The Fourth Colour

This year's despatch from Moriond. Inconclusive LHCb data are already stimulating some strange new ideas...

In the middle of the Rencontres de Moriond particle physics conference in Italy, the scientific talks stopped to allow a standing ovation dedicated to the memory and achievements of my inspirational colleague Stephen Hawking, who we heard had died earlier that day.

The talks quickly resumed, which I think Stephen would have approved of. The most striking thing about the scientific content of the conference this year was that a whole day was dedicated to the weirdness in bottom particles that Tevong You and I wrote about last November. As Marco Nardecchia reviewed in his talk (PDF), bottom particles produced in the LHCb detector in proton collisions are decaying too often in certain particular ways, compared to predictions from the Standard Model of particle physics. Their decay products are coming out with the wrong angles too often compared with predictions, too.