Standard Model Possibly Under Question after CERN Experiment Finds Anomalous Effect

Andrea Rossi noted on the Journal of Nuclear Physics yesterday that there was news from CERN that could put the Standard Model of physics into question. He wrote:

Yesterday the CERN of Geneva has published on “Physical Review Letters” an important article regarding an anomalous effect discovered by the Large Hadrons Collider in the experiment LHCb on course since 2011 under the direction of Prof. Luigi Campana ( Director of the Frascati Laboratories of the INFN, Italy). The announcement is related to the fact that B mesons have an anomalous tendency to decay into tau leptons instead of into muons, in which they are supposed to decay along the Standard Model: if the Higgs turns out to be different , after it decays, from what we expect, it is sign the Standard Model has failed us; this anomalous effect could therefore open the gate to new Physics and maybe to new information indirectly introducing possible better theoretical explications of LENR, even if they cannot be directly connected with the high energy effects inside the LHC.

I have not been able to find the original article from Physical Review Letters (there’s a pre-print article on arxiv.org here), but there are a couple of recent news articles that cover this development: one from the Italian website Tiscali.it (http://notizie.tiscali.it/articoli/scienza/15/09/annuncio-cern-rivoluzione-fisica.html), and the other from the Indian site The Wire (http://thewire.in/2015/09/07/weak-but-recurring-anomalous-signal-rivets-particle-physicists-10162/)

The second article mentions that this is the third time that results that deviate from the standard model have been found in the particle collider, and combining all these results together them together gives a significance of 3.9 sigma. You have to reach 5 sigma for something to be considered a discovery. So there’s nothing conclusive here yet, but a new question has been raised that at some point might lead to a need for some new physics which could be important for understanding what is going on with LENR effects.

UPDATE: Thanks to Gerrit for the reference to this story in Nature: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v525/n7568/full/525160b.html (full text not available for free)