Today is the start of the Hadron Collider Physics conference, which is being held in Paris this year, hosted by IN2P3. If you understood the post from the organisers last week, you would have learnt that a collaboration requested an extra talk to present a new surprising result.
I’m here to tell you that that collaboration was LHCb and, yes we do have a new surprising result:
The first evidence of CP violation in the charm system.
\(\Delta A_{CP} = −0.82 \pm 0.21 (stat) \pm 0.11 (sys) \% \)
This is pretty exciting as the current Standard Model prediction of this effect is 1‰ or less.
Congratulations to everybody involved in the measurement. I know that the team has been working flat out for past few months double testing and triple testing their analysis in preparation for the public release. Unfortunately there is never any rest for the weary as both the LHCb collaboration and theorists have a lot of work ahead of them in the upcoming months. We experimentalists need to include the rest of the 2011 data and there are plans to perform a completely independent measurement of the same quantity using a different analysis strategy. The theorists need to go back and see whether the Standard Model can accommodate such a large amount of CP violation in the charm system or whether the observation needs a new physics explanation.
