## Saturday, November 04, 2017 ... //

### Allanach, You apply for a $50 collider to find $$Z'$$ or leptoquarks Assertive implications of an LHCb beauty-muon deficit How many articles about flavor physics have you published in the Grauniad? Well, it turns out that Dr Allanach and You have written the essay Anomalous bottoms at CERN and the case for a new collider in which they derive an appealing interpretation from an anomaly seen by the LHCb Collaboration. As I discussed in March and April, the LHCb detector insists on a deficit of $$B$$ mesons decaying to $$K^* \mu^+\mu^-$$. My previous texts are somewhat technical, Allanach and You are a bit less technical, and Futurism.com is arguably even more popular. As Allanach and You put it, if you build 16,000 LHC colliders, you not only pay$160 trillion but you also get approximately one collider in which the agreement with the Standard Model in this single quantity is as bad as this actual single LHC collider of ours actually shows (or worse). When I mentioned the money, I can't resist to mention that the money that will evaporate when the Bitcoin bubble bursts are enough for a dozen of LHC colliders – and even more if there will be additional growth before it bursts. ;-)

OK, there's some 4-sigma deficit.

Well, why did they write this text 3 days ago and not in March and April as this blog? It's because they also promote their 2-week-old hep-ph preprint (with Gripaios)
The Case for Future Hadron Colliders From $$B \to K^{(*)} \mu^+ \mu^-$$ Decays
What do they conclude?

They study two most obvious explanations for the anomaly they can think of – assuming that the deviation is more than a random fluke or bad luck: the new, $$Z'$$-bosons similar to the $$Z$$-boson but heavier; and leptoquarks, new elementary particles whose quantum numbers coincide with a bound state of a lepton and a quark.

In their paper, some of the parameter space is covered by luminosity-upgraded LHC. For some other pieces of the parameter space, they want you to upgrade the LHC to $$33\TeV$$, a more than doubled energy. But they really want you to pay for a $$100\TeV$$ collider such as the FCC-$$hh$$ which would be nice. You really need to produce the $$Z'$$-bosons or leptoquarks directly to know who is reponsible for the deviation.

How do the LHC girls understand the bottom quark? It's the fourth event of its kind that they experience with a boy. I hope no one misinterprets this comment as sexist; it's supposed to be sexual. ;-)

In the Guardian, Allanach and You say that the situation could be analogous to the year 2011 when some hints began to emerge that the quasi-light Higgs boson existed but before it was discovered. Well, maybe. A big difference is that the Higgs boson had to exist – because of solid arguments needed for our theories (explaining well-established important particle physics phenomena) to be consistent. So far fishy LHCb deviations are the only reasons to believe that $$Z'$$-bosons or leptoquarks should exist.

But if you have spare \$50 billion or a few million Bitcoins (hello, Satoshi) for a new collider, you can use the donation buttons in the right column. If I had to pay it purely because of this LHCb anomaly, I would at least wait whether the deviation as the number of standard deviations will grow when the data is doubled after 2017. But maybe they already know that it will grow – the papers aren't out yet, I think.