The LHC Era

My visit to the University of Warwick in September naturally made me regret my ignorance of the LHCb experiment. Very little time remains for theorists to get off their asses (yours truly included) and make some decent predictions.

The LHCb experiment will study bottom quark physics. It consists of a vertex detector, track reconstruction capabilities, and two Cherenkov detectors for velocity measurements and particle identification, which will separate pions and kaons.

In particular, LHCb will further study the beyond the standard model CDF result for the CP violation parameter $2 \beta_{s}$ in decays of the meson $B_{s}^{0}$. The definition of this parameter is

$2 \beta_{s} = 2 \textrm{arg} \frac{V_{ts} V_{tb}^{*}}{V_{cs} V_{cb}^{*}}$

in terms of the usual CKM matrix parameters. As CDF points out (cheers, Tommaso):

The presence of physics beyond the standard model could contribute additional processes and modify the magnitude
or the phase of the mixing amplitude.

The Standard Model predicts $2 \beta_{s} = 0.04$, in contrast to the observation that $2 \beta_{s}$ lies in the interval $[0.32,2.82]$, with $68%$ confidence. The D0 experiment also reports on this decay.