Testing the Standard Model with rare decays at the LHCb

Abstract

The LHCb experiment [1] at CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is focused on the study of b-quark hadrons to perform precision measurements of CP violating observables and rare decays that could unravel possible contributions from new physics (NP) beyond the Standard Model (SM). At the LHC proton-proton (pp) collision energies, charmed mesons and tau leptons are also copiously produced (at the level of b-hadrons or higher), and therefore, the corresponding equivalent observables can also be studied. These proceedings concentrate on key measurements of rare decays, while the measurements on CP violation observables are described on separate proceedings contribution [2]. The LHCb detector, described elsewhere [1], has been performing extremely well in the first LHC runs. With around 99% of operational readout channels and approximately a 95% of data taking efficiency, the LHCb experiment has been able to fully exploit the provided luminosity delivered by the LHC accelerator. The measurements presented here, unless mentioned otherwise, have been performed using the data set, corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 1.0 fb−1 of pp collisions collected at a centre-of-mass energy of 7 TeV during 2011. Roughly an additional 2 fb−1 of data at a centre-of-mass energy of 8 TeV have been collected during 2012 and, therefore, some of the analyses here presented might reach an increased sensitivity, once the entire data set is analysed.