Science is, like all human endeavors, full of competition. As in all competition, friendly or otherwise, there has to be somebody who gets disappointed. Today, I am pleased to announce that I am a little disappointed.
My competitors in the “Belle Collaboration”:http://belle.kek.jp have announced at a major conference they have observed the rare B decay B+ → τ+ ν [FPCPBelleBTauNu].
I’ve spent the better part of the last 5 years of my life searching for this process. I’ve been part of pioneering efforts to create virtual “single B beams” where you reconstruct one of the two B mesons produced in our collider, which then turns each collision into essentially a single-B event. We can can look at that remaining B for evidence of the rare decay. Belle used the best aspects of this technique on a dataset that is twice as big as what we had available a year ago, when we last did this analysis, and has strong evidence for its existence.
This is ground-breaking. This would be the first time a purely leptonic decay of the B meson was observed. This is important, because leptons allow us to cleanly probe the structure of the B meson itself. Using this rare decay, we can probe the inner workings of the B and thus the Standard Model itself.
I am disappointed, but elated. Science is often full of personal contradictions. I have to put the data above my personal feelings. Besides, I am still going full tilt with my colleagues to produce a BaBar result on this decay for summer. There’s yet dry powder left in this keg!
.. [FPCPBelleBTauNu] “http://fpcp2006.triumf.ca/displayTalk.php?path=dGFsa3MvZGF5MS8wOTM1L0ZQQ1BfMjAwNmFwcjA5X2lrYWRvLnBkZg==&time=09:35:00&date=2006-04-09”:http://fpcp2006.triumf.ca/displayTalk.php?path=dGFsa3MvZGF5MS8wOTM1L0ZQQ1BfMjAwNmFwcjA5X2lrYWRvLnBkZg==&time=09:35:00&date=2006-04-09
