LHCb's binned angular analysis of B⁰ → K*⁰μ⁺μ⁻ decays — published in Physical Review Letters using 8.4 inverse femtobarns from Runs 1 and 2 — sits at four sigma against Standard-Model predictions. [1] The P5' observable, which previously deviated at 3.7 sigma in the 2011 1-fb⁻¹ sample and at 3.3 sigma in the combined Run 1 / 2016 result, holds the pattern in the larger dataset. CMS's independent measurement aligns directionally. Tuesday's paper read the four-sigma hold as the field marking its institutional clock against the political one. The Wednesday read is the timeline.

Run 3 — the LHC operating campaign that began in July 2022 and is scheduled through end-2026 — has cleared roughly three times the 2018 dataset. [2] The five-sigma threshold the field treats as discovery has not been crossed. The next analysis to update the result will fold in Run 3 data and require improved lattice-QCD calculations of the charming-penguin amplitude — the Standard-Model contribution from virtual charm-quark loops that may or may not account for the deviation inside the model's allowed range. The lattice calculation has been the field's bottleneck for nearly a decade.

The discovery clock has moved. CERN's High-Luminosity LHC and the LHCb Upgrade II — together delivering roughly fifteen times the present integrated dataset — come online in 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. The four-sigma plateau is what particle physics looks like at its current edge: an experimental signal large enough to take seriously, a theoretical calculation that cannot yet rule it in or out, and a discovery threshold reached only by an instrument the field is still building. The CP-asymmetry observables in the same paper agree with Standard-Model expectations. The asymmetry is between what the experiment can measure and what the theory can predict.

-- KENJI NAKAMURA, Tokyo