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Particle Physics Seminars
Searching for the weak among the strong at LHCb --- extremely rare decays of excited B mesons into two muons.
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Europe/London
Small Lecture Theatre (Poynting)
Small Lecture Theatre
Poynting
Description
Weak decays of excited vector mesons, such as D*0 or B(s)*0 into two leptons, offer the opportunity to search for deviations from Standard Model (SM) expectations. These decays are not helicity suppressed, in contrast to the analogous decays of pseudoscalar mesons, meaning that they can provide complementary constraints on non-SM contributions. However, excited vector mesons decay predominantly via strong or electromagnetic interactions, and therefore the branching fractions of their weak leptonic decays are highly suppressed, making it extremely challenging to measure their decay properties.
In my talk, I will give an overview of recent searches for weak decays of vector mesons into dimuon final states at LHCb. The searches exploited the production of vector mesons in hadronic exclusive B(c) decays to suppress background through the displaced B(c)-vertex signature. This endeavour led also to a search for nonresonant Bc->pimumu decays — a potential background source — which are interesting on their own as they occur purely via annihilation diagrams.
