First experimental signs of a New Physics beyond the Standard Model

The Standard Model, which has given the most complete explanation up to now of the universe, has gaps, and is unable to explain phenomena like dark matter or gravitational interaction between particles. Physicists are therefore seeking a more fundamental theory that they call "New Physics", but up to now there has been no direct proof of its existence, only indirect observation of dark matter, as deduced, among other things, from the movement of the galaxies.

A team of physicists formed by the professor of Physics at Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB) Joaquim Matias, Javier Virto, postdoctoral researcher at the same university, and Sebastien Descotes Genon, from the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) / Université Paris-Sud, has predicted that New Physics would implie the existence of deviations in the probability of a very specific decay of a particle, the B meson. Detecting these small deviations through an experiment would be the first direct proof of the existence of this fundamental theory.

On 19 July of this year, at the EPS 2013 international conference on particle physics in Stockholm, scientists at the LHCb detector, one of the large experiments being conducted by the CERN's LHC accelerator, presented the results of the experimental measurements of the B meson decay. The measurements showed deviations with respect to the predictions of the Standard Model that were previously calculated by UAB and CNRS researchers. The team of scientists have prooved that all these deviations show a coherent pattern and that has allowed them to identify their oringin from a unique source.