Weekend plot: rare decays of B mesons, once again

This weekend's plot shows the measurement of the branching fractions for neutral B and Bs mesons decays into  muon pairs:

This is not exactly a new thing. LHCb and CMS separately announced evidence for the B0s→μ+μ- decay in summer 2013, and a preliminary combination of their results appeared a few days after. The plot above comes from the recent paper where a more careful combination is performed, though the results change only slightly.

A neutral B meson is a  bound state of an anti-b-quark and a d-quark (B0) or an s-quark (B0s), while for an anti-B meson the quark and the antiquark are interchanged. Their decays to μ+μ- are interesting because they are very suppressed in the standard model. At the parton level, the quark-antiquark pair annihilates into a μ+μ- pair. As for all flavor changing neutral current processes, the lowest order diagrams mediating these decays occur at the 1-loop level. On top of that, there is the helicity suppression by the small muon mass, and the CKM suppression by the small Vts (B0s) or Vtd (B0) matrix elements. Beyond the standard model one or more of these suppression factors may be absent and the contribution could in principle exceed that of the standard model even if the new particles are as heavy as ~100 TeV. We already know this is not the case for the B0s→μ+μ- decay. The measured branching fraction (2.8 ± 0.7)x10^-9  agrees within 1 sigma with the standard model prediction (3.66±0.23)x10^-9. Further reducing the experimental error will be very interesting in view of observed anomalies in some other b-to-s-quark transitions. On the other hand, the room for new physics to show up  is limited,  as the theoretical error may soon become a showstopper.

Situation is a bit different for the B0→μ+μ- decay, where there is still relatively more room for new physics. This process has been less in the spotlight. This is partly due to a theoretical prejudice: in most popular new physics models it is impossible to generate a large effect in this decay without generating a corresponding excess in B0s→μ+μ-. Moreover,  B0→μ+μ- is experimentally more difficult:  the branching fraction predicted by the standard model is (1.06±0.09)x10^-10, which is 30 times smaller than that for  B0s→μ+μ-. In fact, a 3σ evidence for the B0→μ+μ- decay appears only after combining LHCb and CMS data. More interestingly, the measured branching fraction, (3.9±1.4)x10^-10, is some 2 sigma above the standard model value. Of course, this is  most likely a statistical fluke, but nevertheless it will be interesting to see an update once the 13-TeV LHC run collects enough data.

Planck: what's new

Slides from the recent Planck collaboration meeting are now available online. One can find there preliminary results that include an input from Planck's measurements of the polarization of the  Cosmic Microwave Background (some which were previously available via the legendary press release in French). I already wrote about the new  important limits on dark matter annihilation cross section. Here I picked up a few more things that may be of interest for a garden variety particle physicist.

• ΛCDM. 
  Here is a summary of Planck's best fit parameters of the standard cosmological model with and without the polarization info:
  
  Note that the temperature-only numbers are slightly different than in the 2013 release, because of improved calibration and foreground cleaning.  Frustratingly, ΛCDM remains  solid. The polarization data do not change the overall picture, but they shrink some errors considerably. The Hubble parameter remains at a low value; the previous tension with Ia supernovae observations seems to be partly resolved and blamed on systematics on the supernovae side.  For the large scale structure fans, the parameter σ8 characterizing matter fluctuations today remains at a high value, in some tension with weak lensing and cluster counts. 
• Neff.
  There are also better limits on deviations from ΛCDM. One interesting result is the new improved constraint on the effective number of neutrinos, Neff in short. The way this result is presented may be confusing.  We know perfectly well there are exactly 3 light active (interacting via weak force) neutrinos; this has been established in the 90s at the LEP collider, and Planck has little to add in this respect. Heavy neutrinos, whether active or sterile, would not show in this measurement at all.  For light sterile neutrinos, Neff implies an upper bound on the mixing angle with the active ones. The real importance of  Neff lies in that it counts any light particles (other than photons) contributing to the energy density of the universe at the time of CMB decoupling. Outside the standard model neutrinos, other theorized particles could contribute any real positive number to Neff, depending on their temperature and spin. A few years ago there have been consistent hints of Neff  much larger 3, which would imply physics beyond the standard model. Alas, Planck has shot down these claims. The latest number combining Planck and Baryon Acoustic Oscillations is Neff =3.04±0.18, spot on 3.046 expected from the standard model neutrinos.  This represents an important constraint on any new physics model with very light (less than eV) particles. 
• Σmν.
  The limit on the sum of the neutrino masses keeps improving and gets into a really interesting regime. Recall that, from oscillation experiments, we can extract the neutrino mass differences: Δm32 ≈ 0.05 eV and Δm12≈0.009 eV up to a sign, but we don't know their absolute masses.  Planck and others have already excluded the possibility that all 3 neutrinos have approximately the same mass. Now they are not far from probing the so-called inverted hierarchy, where two neutrinos have approximately the same mass and the 3rd is much lighter, in which case Σmν ≈ 0.1 eV. Planck and Baryon Acoustic Oscillations set the limit Σmν < 0.16 eV at 95% CL, however this result is not strongly advertised because it is sensitive to the value of the Hubble parameter. Including non-Planck measurements leads to a weaker, more conservative limit Σmν < 0.23 eV, the same as quoted in the 2013 release. 
• CνB.
  For dessert, something cool. So far we could observe the cosmic neutrino background only through its contribution to the  energy density of radiation in the early universe. This affects observables that can be inferred from the CMB acoustic peaks, such as the Hubble expansion rate or the time of matter-radiation equality. Planck, for the first time, probes the properties of the CνB. Namely, it measures the  effective sound speed ceff and viscosity cvis parameters, which affect the growth of perturbations in the CνB. Free-streaming particles like the neutrinos should have ceff^2 =  cvis^2 = 1/3, while Planck measures ceff^2 = 0.3256±0.0063 and  cvis^2 = 0.336±0.039. The result is unsurprising, but it may help constraining some more exotic models of neutrino interactions. 

To summarize, Planck continues to deliver disappointing results, and there's still more to follow ;)

After-weekend plot: new Planck limits on dark matter

The Planck collaboration just released updated results that include an input from their  CMB polarization measurements. The most interesting are the new constraints on the annihilation cross section of dark matter:

Dark matter annihilation in the early universe injects energy into the primordial plasma and increases the ionization fraction. Planck is looking for imprints of that in the CMB temperature and polarization spectrum. The relevant parameters are the dark matter mass and  <σv>*feff, where <σv> is the thermally averaged annihilation cross section during the recombination epoch, and feff ~0.2 accounts for the absorption efficiency. The new limits are a factor of 5 better than the latest ones from the WMAP satellite, and a factor of 2.5 better than the previous combined constraints.

What does it mean for us?  In vanilla models of thermal WIMP dark matter <σv> = 3*10^-26 cm^3/sec, in which case dark matter particles with masses below ~10 GeV are excluded by Planck. Actually, in this mass range the Planck limits are far less stringent the ones obtained by the Fermi collaboration from gamma-ray observations of dwarf galaxies. However, the two are complementary to some extent. For example, Planck probes the annihilation cross section in the early universe, which can be different than today. Furthermore, the CMB constraints obviously do not depend on the distribution of dark matter in galaxies, which is a serious source of uncertainty for cosmic rays experiments.  Finally, the CMB limits extend to higher dark matter masses where gamma-ray satellites lose sensitivity. The last point implies that Planck can weigh in on the PAMELA/AMS cosmic-ray positron excess. In models where the dark matter annihilation cross section during the recombination epoch is the same as today, the mass and cross section range that can explain the excess is excluded by Planck. Thus, the new results make it even more difficult to interpret the positron anomaly as a signal of dark matter.