## Tuesday, May 18, 2010

### Another chink in the armor of the Standard Model?

Via Resonaances: The D0 collaboration has a new paper on the arXiv in which they present their observations of a like-sign muon charge asymmetryin B meson decays.

Neutral B mesons can decay into an antimuon, a mu neutrino and other stuff (B0 --> μ+νμ Xc) via the weak interaction \bar{b} --> \bar{c} W+, and neutral anti-B mesons can accordingly decay into an muon, a mu antineutrino and other stuff. However, neutral B mesons can oscillate into their antiparticles and back, so that if a B-Bbar pair is created in a collision, and one particle of the pair decays into a muon-neutrino pair while in its original state whereas the other decays into a muon-neutrino pair while turned into the antiparticle of its original state, both of them will decay into muons, or both into antimuons -- a like-sign muon decay.

If CP was an exact symmetry of nature, the rates for the oscillation and decays would be equal between B and anti-B mesons, but since it is not, CP violation leads to a difference in the rate at which the initial B-Bbar pair decays into positive and negative like-sign muon pairs -- a charge asymmetry. The Standard Model predicts a very small such charge asymmetry stemming from the complex phase in theCKM matrix.

What the D0 collaboration have done is to measure the charge asymmetry, carefully subtracting all (hopefully) sources of background, and obtained a result thatis about two orders of magnitude larger than the Standard Model prediction! Of course the experimental result has statistical and systematic errors, and thus the relevant measure of deviation from the Standard Model is only about 3σ ... still, this is another chink in the armor of the Standard Model.

What I find interesting is that all of the evidence of flavour physics beyond the Standard Model comes from particles containing a strange (rather than an up or down) quark besides a heavy flavour. The contribution to the charge asymmetry from B0d decays is well constrained by other experiments, so most of the D0 result would appear to be coming from the B0s system. I'm not a BSM phenomenologist, but I could imagine this to be relevant input for an understanding of possible BSM physics.

The Standard Model predictions rely on hadronic quantities such as decay constants, form factors and mixing parameters of the B meson, which must be determined nonperturbatively in lattice QCD. Better accuracy here could have real impact on the most stringent tests of the Standard Model that we have so far, and this is an area where significant progress is being made.