Time for a blog post that has been far too long coming! Remember the Quest for B Meson Decay? I wrote about this several months ago: the LHCb experiment had seen one of the rarest interactions in particle physics, the decay of the \(\mathrm{B}^0_s\) meson into a muon and antimuon, for the first time after 25 years of searching.

Lots of physicists were interested in this particular decay because it’s unusually good at distinguishing between different theories. The standard model (which incorporates only known particles) predicts that a muon and antimuon should be produced in about 3.56 out of every billion \(\mathrm{B}^0_s\) decays — a number known as the branching ratio. But many other theories that involve additional, currently unknown particles, predict drastically different values. A precise measurement of the branching ratio thus has the ability to either rule out lots of theoretical predictions, or provide the first confirmation on Earth of the existence of unknown particles!

Naturally, most physicists were hoping for the latter possibility — having an unknown particle to look for makes things exciting. But so far, the outlook doesn’t look good. Last November, LHCb announced their measurement of the branching ratio …

Yesterday’s big news in the physics world: the LHCb experiment has observed a \(3.5\sigma\) asymmetry between the decays of \(D^0\) and \(\bar{D}^0\) mesons. This has already been described in detail elsewhere on the web: Sean Carroll has a nice explanation accessible to non-experts, or you can look at the presentation of the results from the HCP conference (which itself is reasonably clear and informative, if you have some experience looking at particle physics presentations).

For those who are not inclined to click on links, here’s a quick summary of the story. CP symmetry violation is a difference between the behaviors of a particle and the mirror image of its antiparticle. The probability of a CP-violating process to occur is controlled by a complex phase parameter in the quark mixing matrix. There are two kinds of CP-violating processes that we can detect:

• Some particles (kaons, D and B mesons) transform into their antiparticles and back as they propagate. CP violation means that the oscillation probability for going from the particle to the antiparticle is different from the probability to go from the antiparticle to the particle. Intuitively, you could imagine that the meson spends …