Thursday, October 1, 2026
4:00 pm-5:00 pm
Challenging the Standard Model of Particle Physics with Bottom Quarks
Bottom quarks are the second-heaviest type of quark known to us. They are also unusually long-lived because their most common decay modes are suppressed by small mixing parameters. This combination of properties makes bottom quarks especially sensitive to physics beyond the Standard Model, such as hypothetical new types of gauge bosons. Several discrepancies between Standard-Model expectations and measurements at particle colliders have emerged in decays of bottom quarks inside mesons. I will discuss these processes and the Standard-Model predictions, which depend on nonperturbative calculations of the strong interactions of the quarks using lattice quantum chromodynamics. I will also show that valuable new information can be obtained from decays of bottom baryons produced by the Large Hadron Collider.
