Dr Mark Smith - The potent power of the penguin

Wednesday 1 Oct 2025, 13:30 → 15:00 Europe/London

610 (G.O. Jones Bulding)

https://fnal.zoom.us/j/93197574512?pwd=bGlJTHlGTnVtTFFwRnlpYnhrdm5rdz09

About the speaker: 

Dr Mark Smith completed his PhD studies at the University of Manchester in 2016. Afterwards he joined the Imperial College as a postdoctoral researcher working in tree-level semileptonic decays of B mesons and rare penguin decays. In 2020 he was awarded the LHCb Early Career Researcher Prize. Between the years 2021 and 2023 he was convener for the LHCb semileptonic physics working group, and currently he is one of the LHCb contacts for the LHC physics center heavy flavour working group.

13:30 → 14:00 Biscuits/Coffee/Socialization

14:00 → 15:00 The potent power of the penguin

Flavour changing neutral currents are suppressed in the Standard Model, making them a prime avenue to search for new physics. Over the past decade a consistent set of discrepancies between experimental measurements and theoretical expectations in b->smumu decays has emerged. The flagship b->smumu mode is the decay B0->K*mumu , where discrepancies have been observed in angular observables, such as P5' and in the differential branching fraction.

In this seminar, a new comprehensive analysis of the B0->K*mumu decay will be presented, made with 8.4fb^-1 of LHCb pp collision data collected in 2011-2012 and 2016-2018. Results will be shown for the angular observables of the decay, which for the first time will include considerations for the effect of the muon mass. Furthermore, the differential branching fraction in q2 will be presented, as well as the complete set of CP-asymmetry observables. Finally, this measurement accounts fully for the contributions of S-wave decays and their interference, from which the complete set of observables will be shown.

Convener: Dr Mark Smith (Imperial College London)

QMUL_seminar.pdf