A measurement of the ratio of branching fractions of the decays B þ → K þ μ þ μ − and B þ → K þ e þ e − is presented. The proton-proton collision data used correspond to an integrated luminosity of 5.0 fb −1 recorded with the LHCb experiment at center-of-mass energies of 7, 8, and 13 TeV. For the dilepton mass-squared range 1.1 < q 2 < 6.0 GeV 2 =c 4 the ratio of branching fractions is measured to be R K ¼ 0.846 þ0.060 −0.054 þ0.016 −0.014 , where the first uncertainty is statistical and the second systematic. This is the most precise measurement of R K to date and is compatible with the standard model at the level of 2.5 standard deviations.

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.

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