Anomalies in Hadronic B Decays

by David London (Université de Montréal)

Tuesday Mar 10, 2026, 4:00 PM → 5:30 PM Europe/Madrid

C7b/058 - Seminar (IFAE Main Building C7b)

As the LHC has not found any new particles, we must use indirect searches to look for signs
of new physics. There have been a number of claims of anomalies in certain hadronic B decays,
but they are not convincing, as they generally involve theoretical input and/or have unknown
QCD corrections. My collaborators and I recently performed a global fit to all B → P P decays
(P is a pseudoscalar meson) under the assumption of flavour SU(3) symmetry (SU(3)F ). We
find a disagreement with the SM at the level of 4.1σ. This can be accounted for by adding
SU(3)F -breaking effects, but 1000% breaking is required, far larger than the ∼ 30% expected
in the SM. This result is rigorous, group-theoretically – no theoretical input is involved. But if
some well-motivated theoretical input is added, the discrepancy grows to 4.9σ.