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.<\/p>\n
\nMy competitors in the “Belle Collaboration”:http:\/\/belle.kek.jp have announced at a major conference they have observed the rare B decay B+<\/sup> → τ+<\/sup> ν [FPCPBelleBTauNu]. \nThis 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.<\/p>\n \nI 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!<\/p>\n .. [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<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"activitypub_content_warning":"","activitypub_content_visibility":"","activitypub_max_image_attachments":3,"activitypub_interaction_policy_quote":"anyone","activitypub_status":"","footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-652","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-science","7":"czr-hentry"},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/steve.cooleysekula.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/652","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/steve.cooleysekula.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/steve.cooleysekula.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/steve.cooleysekula.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/steve.cooleysekula.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=652"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/steve.cooleysekula.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/652\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/steve.cooleysekula.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=652"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/steve.cooleysekula.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=652"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/steve.cooleysekula.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=652"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nI’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.<\/p>\n
\n