2026-07-02
Recently, the High Energy Physics Team of the Center for Theoretical Physics, School of Physics, Henan Normal University, have achieved important progress in the field of heavy flavor physics. The research results were published in Physical Review Letters—a premier international journal in physics—under the title “First measurement of time dependent CP violation in FCNC decay , and were selected as an Editors’ Pick. The work was led by the Center for Theoretical Physics, with young faculty member Li Kechen making a principal contribution to the research and serving as the corresponding author.
Flavor-changing neutral-current (FCNC) processes are extremely rare and highly suppressed in the Standard Model of particle physics, making them exceptionally sensitive to any signals of new physics beyond the Standard Model; they are therefore regarded as ideal probes for exploring new physics. Based on a large sample of proton–proton collision data collected with the LHCb detector, the research team employed deep learning algorithms and detector calibration techniques to successfully extract the extremely rare decay signal, achieving the first precise measurement of time-dependent CP violation in the rare decay
. The results are consistent with the Standard Model predictions within uncertainties. The establishment of this measurement method provides an independent and complementary new avenue for exploring new physics in semileptonic b-quark decays, and also offers an analysis framework that can serve as a reference for future measurements of time-dependent CP violation in similar physics processes.
The LHCb experiment is one of the major international collaborative experiments at the Large Hadron Collider at the European Organization for Nuclear Research, with a long-standing commitment to research on heavy-flavor physics, CP violation, and the search for new physics. Henan Normal University is the 10th member institution to join the LHCb international collaboration,following Tsinghua University, the University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, and the Institute of High Energy Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. This achievement is another major research outcome accomplished by the research team of the Center for Theoretical Physics, School of Physics since HNU joined the LHCb international collaboration, injecting new momentum into the university’s efforts to deepen international cooperation in theoretical physics and to promote the coordinated development of theory and experiment. The research was supported by the Natural Science Foundation of Henan Province and other funding programs.
Paper link:https://link.aps.org/doi/10.1103/nnt3-nyds
(Wang Yilong, Zhang Haoxing, School of Physics)
