How universal is (lepton) universality?
Wednesday, June 4, 2014 - 08:20
in Physics & Chemistry
Just as a picture can be worth a thousand words, so the rarest processes at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) can sometimes have the most to tell us. By isolating and counting decays of B+ mesons to a kaon and two leptons, the LHCb experiment has tested a key assumption of the Standard Model – lepton universality, the idea that electrons, muons and tau leptons should behave in the same way, and be produced equally often in weak decays. In a presentation given at this week's Large Hadron Collider Physics conference, LHCb results reveal the first hints of a difference.