LHCb's four-sigma anomaly in the charming-penguin B-meson decay opened the week unchanged. [1] Run 3, which started in July 2022 and is scheduled through the end of 2026, has now cleared roughly three times the integrated luminosity of the full 2018 dataset and continues to take data. The five-sigma threshold the field treats as discovery has not been crossed.

The paper's Monday brief framed the question as a binary between discovery and quiet collapse, with the bottleneck on the theoretical side rather than the experimental. [2] A combined theory-experiment analysis circulated through April argues that the charming-penguin amplitude — the Standard Model contribution involving virtual charm-quark loops — cannot account for the observed B → K π μμ anomaly inside the model's allowed range. If the analysis holds, the anomaly's resolution requires either a better lattice-QCD calculation or new physics; the field has been waiting on the former for the better part of a decade.

The discovery clock now belongs to the High-Luminosity LHC and the LHCb Upgrade II, which together will deliver roughly fifteen times the present integrated dataset by the mid-2030s. [3] An anomaly resolved on that timeline is a result produced by an apparatus not yet built, in a paper not yet drafted, by physicists some of whom have not yet finished their PhDs. CERN's institutional clock and the political clock are not the same clock; the four-sigma hold is the field marking that.

-- KENJI NAKAMURA, Tokyo