Lubos, mon cher Lubos, ne vois tu rien venir ?

Dialogue imaginaire avec un autre blogueur (1)

// Dame Nature me fait parfois penser au terrible Barbe Bleu et le bestiaire des particules pas (encore) "vues" à toutes ses épouses mystérieusement disparues dont les dépouilles sont cachées dans une pièce de son château, pièce qu'une ingénue et dernière épouse finit par découvrir. Pour filer la métaphore je me demande si le Higgs n'est pas d'une certaine manière cette dernière épouse ... Alors la question suivante, enfantine et donc cruelle et naïve, serait naturellement: quels sont les noms des précédentes défuntes? 

En attendant voici quelques éléments de réponse possible à la question posée dans le titre du billet :

... The invariant masses of the pairs of mesons where this shocking thing occurs are either several GeVs or around 15GeV. Bizarre. Next time when you hear that the LHCb excludes all new physics, don't forget that quite some breathtaking results have been swept under the rug if not fully censored when such a bold negative statement was made...

In the aggressive case, these asymmetries could be signs of some new – perhaps supersymmetric – particles. Perhaps the same particles that make up the dark matter and that could be announced this or next week. Perhaps sgluinos in some extended gauge sector. Adam Davis proposes a conservative competing theory involving "just a partial interference" of the quantum amplitudes for different processes. I am not sure I understand what it means even though I also believe that the deviation is pretty likely to be due to some incorrect calculation of the predictions, a forgotten subtlety.

Lubos Motl, LHCb: 7-σ and 9-σ anomalies in CP-violation 04/03/13 

March 2013 is expected to be a great dark matter month, especially due to the eagerly expected results from AMS-02 that may emerge as early as the next week (ANTARES has seen nothing a few days ago). Joseph S. has brought my attention to an excellent astro-ph paper by Tracy Slatyer (IAS) and Dan Hooper (FNAL)

that eliminates all doubts that the authors belong among the very top of the world's astroparticle physics. They looked at the spectrum of the Fermi bubbles – that Tracy co-discovered – and decided to write down the most natural model(s) that explain(s) the observer spectrum. What the models depend upon – and what the observations should therefore clarify – is what is the spectrum of electrons, the radiation, and masses and dominant decay channels of hypothetical dark matter particles that team up to produce the spectrum.

... this radiation seems to be consistent with the annihilation of dark matter particles! It's either due to 10GeV dark matter particles pair-annihilating into lepton pairs or due to50GeV dark matter particles annihilating into quark-antiquark pairs. They seem to propose two comparably likely scenarios for the possible mass and dominant interactions of the dark matter particles.

Note that none of these two scenarios should be new to the TRF readers. A possible 10GeV dark matter particle has been discussed many times in the context of the "Is Dark Matter Seen" war between the direct search experiments. The allies in the "Dark Matter Is Seen" coalition do generally claim that they see collisions with numerous 10GeV or sub-10GeV dark matter particles. The "Dark Matter Is Not Seen" axis is vehemently rejecting all these assertions.

However, even dark matter particles around 50GeV have previously been spotted by careful TRF readers. In January 2012, I mentioned thatVirgo favored a 20−60GeV dark matter particle. This was based on a fresh preprint by Han et al. who looked into Virgo, Fornax, and Coma clusters through the Fermi satellite and concluded something remarkably similar to Slatyer and Hooper: there is either a 20−60GeV dark matter particle annihilating into bb¯ quark pairs, or a 2−10GeV dark matter particles annihilating into μ+μ−.

Lubos Motl, Bubbles support 10GeV or 50GeV dark matter 01/03/13