Particle Physics Seminar

Abstract: While the Standard Model (SM) of particle physics successfully describes all known particles and their interactions, it is broadly accepted that it is an incomplete description of Nature. Therefore, the search for new physics effects is among the dominant goal of experimental particle physics. In the past few years there has been an increasing interest in rare semi-leptonic decays of beauty mesons, mediated through virtual quantum loops, since an intriguing pattern of tensions with respect to the SM predictions emerged, the so called flavor anomalies. In particular, initial measurements of the lepton flavor universality (LFU) in b -> s l+l– transitions, i.e. particles couple equally to the three lepton generations, has initially suggested that such cornerstone prediction of the SM might have been broken. This seminar will review the status of these anomalies in light of the most recent result from LHCb of the so-called LFU ratios R_K and R_K*, and the implications for this field.