LHCb experiment finds another case of CP violation in nature

The LHCb experiment at the Large Hadron Collider is dedicated mainly to the study of mesons [objects made from a quark of one type, an anti-quark of another type, plus many other particles] that contain bottom quarks (hence the `b’ in the name).  But it also can be used to study many other things, including … Read more

A Neutrino Success Story

Almost all the news on neutrinos in the mainstream press this past few months was about the OPERA experiment, and a possible violation of Einstein’s foundational theory of relativity. That the experiment turned out to be wrong didn’t surprise experts. But one of the concerns that scientists have about how this story turned out and was reported in the press is that perhaps many non-experts may get the impression that science is so full of mistakes that you can’t trust it at all. That would be a very unhappy conclusion — not just unhappy but in fact a very dangerous conclusion, at least for anyone who would like to keep their economy strong, their planet well-treated and their nation well-defended.

So it is important to balance the OPERA mini-fiasco with another hot-off-the-presses neutrino story that illustrates why, even though mistakes in individual scientific experiments are common, collective mistakes in science are rare. A discipline such as physics has intrinsic checks and balances that significantly reduce the probability of errors going unrecognized for long. In the story I’m about to relate, one can recognize how and why scientists start to come to consensus.  Though quite suspicious of any individual experiment, scientists generally take a different view of a group of experiments that buttress one another.

The context of this story, though much less revolutionary than a violation of Einstein’s speed limit, still represents a milestone in our understanding of neutrinos, which has been advancing very rapidly over the past fifteen years or so. When I was a starting graduate student in the late 1980s, almost all we knew about neutrinos was that there were at least three types and that they were much lighter than electrons, and perhaps massless. Today we know much, much more about neutrinos and how they behave. And in just the last few months and weeks and days, one of the missing entries in the Encyclopedia Neutrinica appears to have been filled in.

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News from La Thuile, with Much More to Come

At various conferences in the late fall, the Large Hadron Collider [LHC] experiments ATLAS and CMS showed us many measurements that they made using data they took in spring and summer of 2011. But during the fall their data sets increased in size by a factor of two and a half!  So far this year the only … Read more

LHCb’s Result From November Appears Confirmed by CDF

Back in November, I described a surprising result from the LHCb experiment at the Large Hadron Collider [LHC] concerning “CP violation” in the decays of particles called “D mesons” (which are hadrons that contain an unpaired charm quark or an unpaired charm antiquark) at a level much larger than expected by theorists.  Rather than rehashing the explanation … Read more

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