UMD flavor physics and CP violation group

Our research group, led by Professors Jawahery and Franco Sevilla, is engaged in experimental studies of particles containing bottom quarks, including the breaking of the CP invariance in the decays of these particles. Precise measurements of these decay processes may help reveal important information on the energy scale and the structure of new physics beyond the Standard Model (SM).

The group has had a long history of research in this area since 1981, with the CLEO experiment at Cornell, the OPAL experiment at the LEP collider at CERN, the BaBar experiment at SLAC (1993-present) and the LHCb experiment at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN (2012-present).

Currently, our research focuses on the following areas:

• Tests of lepton flavor universality, a fundamental assumption within the SM that states that the interactions of all charged leptons (electrons, muons, and taus) differ only because of their different masses. Currently, semitauonic $B$ decays such as $B \to D^{(*)}\tau\nu_\tau$ present a deviation with respect to the SM predictions that is significant at the 3.8σ level, eliciting great interest in the particle physics community.
• CP violation measurements that may help explain why our universe has so much more matter than anti-matter. Currently focusing on $B^+ \to K^+\pi^0$ and $B^0 \to {K_S} ^0\pi^0$ decays, which could also help resolve the so-called $K\pi$ puzzle.
• The readout electronics for the new Upstream Tracker detector to be installed into LHCb during 2019 and 2020. This upgraded detector will start to collect run-3 data scheduled at 2021.

If you are interested in learning more about what we do, just email us at jawahery@umd.edu or manuelf@umd.edu and include some information about yourself.