Over the weekend, the LHCb experiment at the Large Hadron Collider released new results bolstering the Standard Model of particle physics.
The collaboration announced that their precision measurements disagreed with earlier results from experiments at the Tevatron at Fermilab. This summer, the CDF experiment announced seeing small excesses over the expected amount of decays of mesons composed of bottom and strange quarks into a pair of muons.
The Standard Model predicts that this decay should happen infrequently. It should take more than 350 trillion collisions for scientists to see it. But if physicists observe it more often than that, it can mean that something beyond the Standard Model is affecting the process.
Looking for excesses like this is one way to search for supersymmetry. Not seeing this type of enhancement does not, however, rule out the existence of supersymmetry, said Sheldon Stone, group leader of experimental elementary particle physics at Syracuse University.
“There is still a lot of room for new physics to appear,” he said.
