The LHCb experiment at CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is designed to make precision measurements of the decays of particles containing beauty and charm quarks. Due to the quantum nature of these decays, particles much heavier than could be produced directly at the LHC can contribute to the processes enacting them, making the so-called flavour sector an excellent test bed for searching for physics beyond the Standard Model (SM). The golden modes of the experiment are decays that are heavily suppressed (or completely forbidden) in the Standard Model of particle physics, as here contributions from undiscovered particles can have a much larger relative effect. The new physics effects can be to change the rates at which a decay occurs, to modify the angular distribution of the decay products, and to alter how matter and antimatter versions of decays relate to each other.
Hints of new physics
Of particular interest at present are decays of the form b → sℓℓ, a beauty quark decaying to a strange quark and two leptons, which proceed via so-called penguin diagrams in the SM. Several of these types of modes are exhibiting deviations from their theoretical predictions. An observable related to the angular distribution of the decay B0 → K*0μ+μ− (P5') is currently in tension with the Standard Model. Leptons (electrons, muons and taus) are treated identically in the SM apart from their mass, however ratios of several decays involving different leptons show large deviations from this assumption of "lepton universality", especially in the semileptonic decays B0 → D(*)ℓ+ν. These deviations are consistent with a new particle with mass greater than 30 TeV, potentially a new vector (Z') or a leptoquark.
The future
LHCb has recently undergone a very large upgrade and data taking restarted in 2021. The upgrade will generate an unprecedented amount of data, with the aim of collecting five times the current sample. This will enable us to resolve the hints of new physics one way or the other, and to make many new, even more precise measurements. Plans are underway for the next set of major upgrades scheduled for 2036.
Imperial contribution
Imperial contributes significantly to LHCb's physics analysis and to the detector itself. We have pioneered many of the rare decays b → s(d)ℓ+ℓ−, which have produced the strongest signs of new physics seen at the LHC, including the angular analysis of B0 → K*0μ+μ− shown in the image above. We are also working on a number of semileptonic analyses and several indirect searches for New Physics. The group is heavily involved in construction and operation of LHCb's ring imaging Cherenkov (RICH) detectors, which play an essential role in identifying the decays, and in the design of the future tracking system.
Imperial contribution
People involved
Contacts
Professor Mitesh Patel
Professor Mitesh Patel
Professor
Dr Michael A McCann
Dr Michael A McCann
Senior Lecturer
Prof. Andrei Golutvin
Prof. Andrei Golutvin
Professor
All group members: Mitesh Patel, Andrei Golutvin, Michael McCann, Mark Smith, Matthew Birch, Scott Ely, Andrea Mauri, Kang Yang, Hanae Tilquin, Rebecca Murta, James Herd, Yiwei Liu, Andy Wang, Henry Linton