Anomalies come with a big splash, but often go down quietly. A recent ATLAS measurement, just posted on arXiv, killed a long-standing and by now almost forgotten anomaly from the LEP collider. LEP was an electron-positron collider operating some time in the late Holocene. Its most important legacy is the very precise measurements of the interaction strength between the Z boson and matter, which to this day are unmatched in accuracy. In the second stage of the experiment, called LEP-2, the collision energy was gradually raised to about 200 GeV, so that pairs of W bosons could be produced. The experiment was able to measure the branching fractions for W decays into electrons, muons, and tau leptons. These are precisely predicted by the Standard Model: they should be equal to 10.8%, independently of the flavor of the lepton (up to a very small correction due to the lepton masses). However, LEP-2 found
Br(W → τν)/Br(W → eν) = 1.070 ± 0.029, Br(W → τν)/Br(W → μν) = 1.076 ± 0.028.
While the decays to electrons and muons conformed very well to the Standard Model predictions,
there was a 2.8 sigma excess in the tau channel. The question was whether it was simply a statistical fluctuation or new physics violating the Standard Model's sacred principle of lepton flavor universality. The ratio Br(W → τν)/Br(W → eν) was later measured at the Tevatron, without finding any excess, however the errors were larger. More recently, there have been hints of large lepton flavor universality violation in B-meson decays, so it was not completely crazy to think that the LEP-2 excess was a part of the same story.
The solution came 20 years later LEP-2: there is no large violation of lepton flavor universality in W boson decays. The LHC has already produced hundreds million of top quarks, and each of them (as far as we know) creates a W boson in the process of its disintegration. ATLAS used this big sample to compare the W boson decay rate to taus and to muons. Their result:
Br(W → τν)/Br(W → μν) = 0.992 ± 0.013.
There is no slightest hint of an excess here. But what is most impressive is that the error is smaller, by more than a factor of two, than in LEP-2! After the W boson mass, this is another precision measurement where a dirty hadron collider environment achieves a better accuracy than an electron-positron machine.
Yes, more of that :)
Thanks to the ATLAS measurement, our knowledge of the W boson couplings has increased substantially, as shown in the picture (errors are 1 sigma):
The current uncertainty is a few per mille. This is still worse than for the Z boson couplings to leptons, in which case the accuracy is better than per mille, but we're getting there... Within the present accuracy, the W boson couplings to all leptons are consistent with the Standard Model prediction, and with lepton flavor universality in particular. Some tensions appearing in earlier global fits are all gone. The Standard Model wins again, nothing to see here, we can move on to the next anomaly.
