Please note that this is still an analysis of "LHC Run 1" data. Fore more details you can visit Jesters blog:<p><a href="http://resonaances.blogspot.de/2015/03/lhcb-b-meson-anomaly-persists.html" rel="nofollow">http://resonaances.blogspot.de/2015/03/lhcb-b-meson-anomaly-...</a><p>"So how excited should we be? One thing we learned today is that the anomaly is unlikely to be a statistical fluctuation. However, the observable is not of the clean kind, as the measured angular distributions are susceptible to poorly known QCD effects. The significance depends a lot on what is assumed about these uncertainties, and experts wage ferocious battles about the numbers."<p>Conclusively: "Therefore, the deviation from the standard model is not yet convincing at this point."
Wow. I was a CERN summer student in 1995 and me and another student worked on the tagging of B-meson decays in ATLAS. Hers was exactly the B->K mu+mu- decay. So 20 years later, it's observed... ;-)<p>(Incidentally, the particle physics publication system is beyond screwed up. We, who did the actual work, weren't even allowed to be authors on the paper where the results were described, because we weren't "members of the ATLAS collaboration". We merely got an acknowledgement.)
Whenever I read something like this I'm reminded of this Douglas Adams quote:<p><pre><code> “There is a theory which states that if ever anyone
discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is
here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by
something even more bizarre and inexplicable.
There is another theory which states that this has
already happened.”</code></pre>
It look like run1 recorded about 10^13 interesting collision events on the b-detector, each on several thousand sensors.
If you wish to scan for a new type of particle you potsulate various decay sequence sensor geometries and intensities, scan all the events and cross your fingers. ANd hope you avoid false positives. Will keep grad students busy for decades mining all this data.