UMD graduate student Emily Jiang delivered a CERN seminar on May 19, 2026, unveiling an important new result on studies of Lepton Flavor Universality using decays of the heaviest B meson, Bc+, which has quark contents of a bottom-quark and anti-charm quark.
The result is primarily the work of Jiang, UMD alumnus Zishuo Yang (Ph.D., 2023), Phoebe Hamilton and Hassan Jawahery, members of the Large Hadron Collider beauty experiment (LHCb) at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland. It was a seven-year effort undertaken while the UMD group was also working on the development and construction of the new LHCb detector.
LHCb
These results are of significant interest in the field because they show deviation from the Standard Model predictions. Previous measurements of similar quantities using the light B mesons from the BaBar experiment at SLAC, Belle Experiment at the KEK laboratory in Japan and the LHCb experiment at CERN are also in tension with the Standard Model. The new results show a similar trend, reinforcing the effect and has been highly anticipated in the field.
Jiang’s presentation can be seen here: https://indico.cern.ch/event/1685950/attachments/3277204/5855756/26-04-23_ejiang_CERN_seminar.pdf
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