26th Australian Institute of Physics Congress and the Australian and New Zealand Conference on Optics and Photonics

Dark sector searches and tests of lepton flavour universality at Belle II

Not scheduled

20m

Belinda Hutchinson Building (The University of Sydney )

Contributed Oral AIP | Nuclear and Particle Physics (NUPP)

Speaker

Daniel Marcantonio (University of Melbourne)

Description

The Belle II experiment at the SuperKEKB collider provides a unique environment for probing physics beyond the Standard Model through both direct dark sector searches and precision tests of lepton flavour universality (LFU). We present recent results on searches for light dark sector mediators, exploiting Belle II's clean collision environment, hermetic detector and dedicated low-multiplicity triggers to access final states that are inaccessible at hadron colliders. We also report on tests of LFU in semileptonic B-meson decays, where persistent tensions with Standard Model predictions motivate improved measurements. The complementarity of these searches with the broader flavour and dark matter programmes is discussed, including connections to the matter-antimatter asymmetry of the universe. We outline the prospects for these analyses with the increasing Belle II dataset and the role of Australian researchers in these efforts.