UKH

Can anyone give me an intelligible summary of the results coming out of LHCb?

Apparently, according to the Standard Model, beauty quarks should decay into equal numbers of muons and electrons, but according to these results more electrons are produced.

I think that's right but, if I'm honest, I have only the haziest idea of what a beauty quark is and I have no idea how the existence of leptoquarks would explain the results, let alone whether this the first step towards warp drive, death rays and infinity stones. 

I can't. I thought they'd discovered an entirely new quark until I found out that "beauty quark" was just a different name for "bottom quark". But, I like the idea of cracks appearing in the Standard Model; hopefully it's got something to do with dark matter.

Dark matter has that feel about it of the photoelectric effect - something observable that just cannot be explained by what's regarded as a really accurate current theory and requires a paradigm shift to explain it. Maybe more of this kind of particle smashing will erode the SM until it's just totally inadequate and we'll get a whole new theory of physics within the next few decades, that explains dark matter and includes gravity too?

A beauty Quark is a very heavy Quark. The Standard Model says it should decay in a certain way, but apparently... it does not seem to do so. Possibly. This is interesting because whenever the Standard Model is shown to be wrong, it gives an idea of how it might need changing, and since we know that the Standard Model definitely is wrong, but not how to fix it, that is a lead of sorts. 

Physicists tend to be very careful about these things. A three Sigma result is not really comprehensive. A five Sigma result which is then backed up by a repeat experiment would be.

Usually the first thing we get is a bigger, shinier particle accelerator. 

Do they wear little bells around their necks,  so you know they are coming .

Sorry I thought you said Leperquarks 

It's life, Dave but not as we know it

It'll be first indication of the existence of the Adams particle

As a simple biologist I struggle to understand most of modern physics, all I know about this was from reading https://www.theguardian.com/science/2021/mar/23/large-hadron-collider-scien... earlier this morning.

 leptoquarks are never around for very long, they tend to get stolen by the Kleptoquarks
 

Yes, I got that from the guy from CERN on R4 this morning.  He spent most of the interview explaining how important it was to check that the result was correct, and how important it was not to get too excited about it, and then he went on to explain about how carefully the results were checked and hard they were trying not to get excited...  and then, even after prompting, almost failed to even outline what the results were, let alone what they might mean.  

Yes, I was afraid it would be.  

Well, it's more enlightening than the BBC's effort, which should win some sort of prize for the most underwhelming title of the year.  Unless it's Skynet's first intervention into human news.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-56491033

Yes, it's easy to forget how ground breaking this was - it was the work for which Einstein received his Nobel Prize, although often over-shadowed by special relativity. 

As for dark matter I'm not sure I even understand the question, let alone the answer.  What's the evidence it exists, just the gravitational effects?  Aren't there other relevant variables, like the Higgs Field (given that it seems we are really in uncharted territory). 

In my understanding yes, it's "just" the gravitational effect. The shape of space-time does not match the matter and radiation within it. That's a big problem for either General Relativity or QM or both. Oh dear!

I don't think the Higgs Field is much use - that provides an explanation of why the particles that form the galaxies are the way they are. I've heard of some LHC experiments looking at whether the Higgs bosons they produced decay into dark matter particles (I guess they leave something missing on the balance sheet) that didn't turn up a right lot.

Well from a theoretical point of view, it's quite hard to explain really (and I am not a physicist, merely an enthusiastic amateur who likes to try the maths occasionally) but basically it's like, imagine if you had an egg and you dropped it, and your model told you "it'll smash half the time," and then when you tried it, it usually smashed, but sometimes it didn't, like 60/40 say. So your understanding of egg physics is wrong! In this case as you'd say we'd expect 50/50 of muons and electrons (both kinds of leptons) but we don't get that. So when we have a quark acting weirdly when it comes to decay into leptons, we ask, is it evidence of interference from a particle that interacts with quarks and leptons i.e the Leptoquark? (A particle that has both a Lepton Number and a Baryon Number... Quarks are Baryons)

The model that predicts this being wrong in this way would be quite exciting to people who spend all their time trying to figure out the weaknesses in the model and create solutions. If your job was about calculating the probability of things smashing when you drop them, the egg experiment would be deeply interesting. 

'Normal' matter is made of two quarks, which were named up and down.  The experiments began to show evidence of a third, heavier quark.  The experimentalists found this a bit strange, and for some time spoke about the strange quark they were working on - the name stuck.  

Strange, like down, was a negative-type quark, so it was quickly theorised that there should be an equivalent heavier positive-type.  This was duly found - the plan worked like a charm.

Then Murray Gell-mann predicted that there should be exactly three pairs of quarks - the regular up and down, the heavier strange and charm, and finally an even heavier pair.  These were named for the truth and the beauty they would represent.  It took a lot longer to find them (heavier particles are harder as they take more energy to create, as per E=mc^2), especially beauty.

And in the meantime, some killjoy decided that truth and beauty was pushing it just a bit too far, and renamed them top and bottom.  There's still a bit of an Atlantic divide on this - the Americans tend to wards top and bottom, and Europeans still stick to truth and beauty.

Officially, the names are simply u, d, s, c, t, and b - so you can call them what you like!

Interesting, thanks!

Skynet has been up there since the 1960s.   I first heard of it in a lecture in 1974, though it's possible that the launches in the 60s might have been sent backwards in time from the future.

... which according to one author on special relativity would be more appropriately named "ponderators", since to an excellent approximation they just add mass to the particles injected into them with no significant increase in speed. Certainly, the new observations provide much food for "pondering". (L. ponderare - to weigh)