More Results From The Large Hadron Collider Point to Entirely New Physics

sciencealert.com ^ | 24 MARCH 2021 | MIKE MCRAE

[BenLurkin]

Update (24 March 2021): The Large Hadron Collider beauty (LHCb) experiment is still insisting there's a flaw in our best model of particle physics.

As explained below, previous results comparing the collider's data with what we might expect from the Standard Model threw up a curious discrepancy by around 3 standard deviations, but we needed a lot more information to be confident it truly reflected something new in physics.

Newly released data have now pushed us closer to that confidence, putting the results at 3.1 sigma; there's still a 1 in 1,000 possibility that what we're seeing is the result of physics just being messy, and not of a new law or particle.

(31 August 2018): Past experiments using CERN's super-sized particle-smasher, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), hinted at something unexpected. A particle called a beauty meson was breaking down in ways that just weren't lining up with predictions.

A small group of physicists took the collider's data on beauty meson (or b meson for short) disintegration, and investigated what might happen if they swapped one assumption regarding its decay for another that assumed interactions were still occurring after they transformed.

Even the most stable of mesons fall apart after hundredths of a second. The framework we use to describe the construction and decay of particles – the Standard Model – describes what we should see when different mesons split up.

The beauty meson is a down quark connected to a bottom anti-quark. When the particle's properties are plugged into the Standard Model, b-meson decay should produce pairs of electrons and positrons, or electron-like muons and their opposites, anti-muons.

This electron or muon outcome should be 50-50. But that's not what we're seeing. Results are showing far more of the electron-positron products than muon-anti-muons.

[SunkenCiv]

LOL

[mywholebodyisaweapon]

It’s never encouraging for a theory when scientists investigate “swapping one assumption for another.”

Sounds like they might have caught a terminal case of the Big Data/Data Mining disease.

[Ozark Tom]

Then there is the work done at the University of Gothenburg, the patents assigned to the University, regarding methods to produce ultra-dense hydrogen. There are papers published in the last two decades, some relevant for the use of UDH (Deuterium) to produce pre-compressed fuel pellets for Inertial Confinement Fusion.

Turns out the UDH of all flavors is only meta-stable, and given a tickle, decomposes. Storing any appreciable amount is currently viewed as impractical, as the material was determined to undergo spontaneous decay.
An induced decay process provided for other possibilities.

Of intense interest was the muon production detected in the scattershot of various hydrogen clusters ejected upon loss of equilibrium. If these muons are decay products from mesons generated by Coulomb explosion in the UDH, some physics would require scrutiny.

Norrønt Fusion Energy is exploring refinement of this discovery toward an application for a muon driven fusion process.