First evidence of photon polarisation in a quark transition

posted by @ulaulaman via @LHCbExperiment #newPhysics #StandardModel #LHC #CERN

There are a lot of model about physics beyond standard model, and the experimental work is concentrate to search signals to select the new models for the future. LHCb has recently released a press release about the transition of a b-quark to an s-quark with the emission of a photon. This transition

is considered a very important process to investigate possible manifestation of new physics. This decay process is forbidden in the first approximation in the Standard Model (SM) of particle physics and moreover in the second-order processes that govern the process in the SM the emitted photon is expected to be strongly polarised. Therefore it is very sensitive to new physics effects arising from the exchange of new heavy particles in electroweak penguin diagrams (see 14 June 2013 news). Indeed, several models of new physics predict that the emitted photon should be less polarised than in the SM. Up to now different experiments have measured the decay rate of this process, ruling out significant deviations of the rate from the SM prediction and strongly reducing the allowed parameter space of new physics models. The photon polarisation was, however, never previously observed.

I think that this is a really intriguing news for a particle physics point of view.