The standard model of particle physics currently provides our best description of fundamental particles and their interactions. The theory predicts that the different charged leptons, the electron, muon and tau, have identical electroweak interaction strengths. Previous measurements have shown that a wide range of particle decays are consistent with this principle of lepton universality. This article presents evidence for the breaking of lepton universality in beauty-quark decays, with a significance of 3.1 standard deviations, based on proton–proton collision data collected with the LHCb detector at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider. The measurements are of processes in which a beauty meson transforms into a strange meson with the emission of either an electron and a positron, or a muon and an antimuon. If confirmed by future measurements, this violation of lepton universality would imply physics beyond the standard model, such as a new fundamental interaction between quarks and leptons.

An angular analysis of the B 0 → K Ã0 ð→ K þ π − Þμ þ μ − decay is presented using a dataset corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 4.7 fb −1 of pp collision data collected with the LHCb experiment. The full set of CP-averaged observables are determined in bins of the invariant mass squared of the dimuon system. Contamination from decays with the K þ π − system in an S-wave configuration is taken into account. The tension seen between the previous LHCb results and the standard model predictions persists with the new data. The precise value of the significance of this tension depends on the choice of theory nuisance parameters.

Conventional, hadronic matter consists of baryons and mesons made of three quarks and a quark–antiquark pair, respectively1,2. Here, we report the observation of a hadronic state containing four quarks in the Large Hadron Collider beauty experiment. This so-called tetraquark contains two charm quarks, a $$\overline{{{{{u}}}}}$$ u ¯ and a $$\overline{{{{{d}}}}}$$ d ¯ quark. This exotic state has a mass of approximately 3,875 MeV and manifests as a narrow peak in the mass spectrum of D0D0π+ mesons just below the D*+D0 mass threshold. The near-threshold mass together with the narrow width reveals the resonance nature of the state.

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