Anomalous bottoms at Cern and the case for a new collider

Particles known as "bottom mesons" are not decaying in the way the Standard Model of particle physics says they should, and it's causing some excitement

Measurements made by the LHCb experiment at CERN are showing some anomalies which, if confirmed by more data, would signal the breaking point of our most fundamental description of particle physics to date - the Standard Model.

Using proton collisions from the LHC, LHCb has been carefully measuring the production of bottom mesons and how often they decay to kaon and muon particles. It looks like the answer is: not nearly often enough! In fact, this decay occurs at only about three-quarters of the frequency predicted by the Standard Model.