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.

Heavy Neutral Leptons (HNLs) are hypothetical particles predicted by many extensions of the Standard Model. These particles can, among other things, explain the origin of neutrino masses, generate the observed matter-antimatter asymmetry in the Universe and provide a dark matter candidate. The SHiP experiment will be able to search for HNLs produced in decays of heavy mesons and travelling distances ranging between O(50 m) and tens of kilometers before decaying. We present the sensitivity of the SHiP experiment to a number of HNL's benchmark models and provide a way to calculate the SHiP's sensitivity to HNLs for arbitrary patterns of flavour mixings. The corresponding tools and data files are also made publicly available.

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.

The Search for Hidden Particles (SHiP) Collaboration has shown that the CERN SPS accelerator with its 400 GeV/c proton beam offers a unique opportunity to explore the Hidden Sector [1–3]. The proposed experiment is an intensity frontier experiment which is capable of searching for hidden particles through both visible decays and through scattering signatures from recoil of electrons or nuclei. The high-intensity experimental facility developed by the SHiP Collaboration is based on a number of key features and developments which provide the possibility of probing a large part of the parameter space for a wide range of models with light long-lived super-weakly interacting particles with masses up to 𝒪(10) GeV/c2 in an environment of extremely clean background conditions. This paper describes the proposal for the experimental facility together with the most important feasibility studies. The paper focuses on the challenging new ideas behind the beam extraction and beam delivery, the proton beam dump, and the suppression of beam-induced background.

The W boson mass is measured using proton-proton collision data at $$ \sqrt{s} $$ s = 13 TeV corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 1.7 fb−1 recorded during 2016 by the LHCb experiment. With a simultaneous fit of the muon q/pT distribution of a sample of W → μν decays and the ϕ* distribution of a sample of Z → μμ decays the W boson mass is determined to be$$ {m}_w=80354\pm {23}_{\mathrm{stat}}\pm {10}_{\mathrm{exp}}\pm {17}_{\mathrm{theory}}\pm {9}_{\mathrm{PDF}}\mathrm{MeV}, $$ m w = 80354 ± 23 stat ± 10 exp ± 17 theory ± 9 PDF MeV , where uncertainties correspond to contributions from statistical, experimental systematic, theoretical and parton distribution function sources. This is an average of results based on three recent global parton distribution function sets. The measurement agrees well with the prediction of the global electroweak fit and with previous measurements.