Journal article
First Evidence for the Decay B-s(0) -> mu( ) mu(-)
R Aaij, C Abellan Beteta, A Adametz, B Adeva, M Adinolfi, C Adrover, A Affolder, Z Ajaltouni, J Albrecht, F Alessio, M Alexander, S Ali, G Alkhazov, P Alvarez Cartelle, AA Alves, S Amato, Y Amhis, L Anderlini, J Anderson, R Andreassen Show all
PHYSICAL REVIEW LETTERS | AMER PHYSICAL SOC | Published : 2013
Abstract
A search for the rare decays B(s)(0)→μ+ μ- and B(0)→μ+ μ- is performed with data collected in 2011 and 2012 with the LHCb experiment at the Large Hadron Collider. The data samples comprise 1.1 fb(-1) of proton-proton collisions at sqrt[s]=8 TeV and 1.0 fb(-1) at sqrt[s]=7 TeV. We observe an excess of B(s)(0)→μ+ μ- candidates with respect to the background expectation. The probability that the background could produce such an excess or larger is 5.3×10(-4) corresponding to a signal significance of 3.5 standard deviations. A maximum-likelihood fit gives a branching fraction of B(B(s)(0)→μ+ μ-)=(3.2(-1.2)(+1.5))×10(-9), where the statistical uncertainty is 95% of the total uncertainty. This..
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Awarded by Science and Technology Facilities Council
Funding Acknowledgements
We express our gratitude to our colleagues in the CERN accelerator departments for the excellent performance of the LHC. We thank the technical and administrative staff at the LHCb institutes. We acknowledge support from CERN and from the national agencies: CAPES, CNPq, FAPERJ, and FINEP (Brazil); NSFC (China); CNRS/IN2P3 and Region Auvergne (France); BMBF, DFG, HGF, and MPG (Germany); SFI (Ireland); INFN (Italy); FOM and NWO (The Netherlands); SCSR (Poland); ANCS/IFA(Romania); MinES, Rosatom, RFBR, and NRC "Kurchatov Institute'' (Russia); MinECo, XuntaGal, and GENCAT (Spain); SNSF and SER (Switzerland); NAS Ukraine (Ukraine); STFC (United Kingdom); NSF (U.S.). We also acknowledge the support received from the ERC under FP7. The Tier1 computing centers are supported by IN2P3 (France), KIT and BMBF (Germany), INFN (Italy), NWO and SURF (The Netherlands), PIC (Spain), and GridPP (U.K.). We are thankful for the computing resources put at our disposal by Yandex LLC (Russia), as well as to the communities behind the multiple open source software packages that we depend on.