The behaviour of the smallest particles in the cosmos is described by the Standard Model. Does this model hold up, now that there seems to be a strange loose end?
He sometimes lies awake over it. In the middle of the night, he then asks himself: what do the measurement results mean? And: “How do you bring them out – without promising too much, and without shortchanging them?”
Niels Tuning is affiliated with the Dutch particle institute Nikhef and leads the data analysis of the LHCb experiment at CERN’s large LHC particle collider near Geneva. For a long time, that LHCb experiment stood in the shadow of the enormous Atlas and CMS experiments that discovered the Higgs particle in 2012. With their much more modest detector, the LHCb physicists studied very different particles (‘b-mesons’, about which more later) and of course they hoped for something unexpected. But this find, even they could not have imagined. The best summary of it: the muon is acting weird.
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Source: NRC