Physics Colloquium

Date
Tue, Sep 30, 2025 3:30 pm - 4:30 pm
Location
1410 Toll Physics Bldg.

Description

Manuel Franco Sevilla, University of Maryland

New physics in heavy quark decays? Challenges to Lepton Flavor Universality from LHCb and prospects with an upgraded detector

Since the establishment of the Standard Model (SM) many decades ago, the three types of charged leptons (electron, muon, and tau) have been seen as doppelgängers of each other in everything but their readings on the scale. That is, the SM interactions of the three lepton families with other particles differ only because of their different masses. This resulting (accidental) symmetry is known as Lepton Flavor Universality (LFU). Since 2012, however, a series of measurements of decays involving b → cτν transitions have repeatedly hinted at the possibility that lepton universality may be, in fact, violated. In this talk I will go over the current status of LFU measurements as well as their future prospects with an upgraded LHCb detector in which the UMD LHCb group played a pivotal role.  

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