BATAVIA, ILLINOIS--Will a rogue penguin demolish the Standard Model of particle physics? Scientists at the Lepton Photon 2003 meeting here hope so. Last week, researchers from Japan told startled colleagues that a peculiar type of particle alchemy known as a "penguin" may have revealed holes in the reigning theory.
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To the audience's surprise, KEK collaborator Thomas Browder of the University of Hawaii, Manoa, announced that the latest value of sin 2b was much lower even than BaBar's value. The difference might indicate that undiscovered particles subtly alter the penguin for this kind of B decay, changing the effective value of sin 2b. And this would probably mean that scientists have gotten the first glimpse of a shadowy mirror realm where each particle in the Standard Model has a "supersymmetric" partner; the size of the particle zoo would have to be doubled.
"A lot of people are not just stunned by this, but shocked," says Ikaros Bigi of the University of Notre Dame, Indiana. Before declaring that physics has pushed beyond the Standard Model, however, scientists must collect more B decays to make sure that the effect is real.
