Groundbreaking research in lattice QCD highlighted as Editors' Suggestion in PRL
A paper published in Physical Review Letters today (https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.134.161901) reports the first lattice-QCD calculation of a semileptonic decay with two hadrons in the final state. The work was led by Stefan Meinel, Associate Professor of Physics in our department, and Luka Leskovec, Assistant Professor at the University of Ljubljana and former postdoc in our department. The paper was highlighted as an Editors' Suggestion, which is often done to showcase articles of high quality, importance, or interest to the broader scientific community.
The specific process considered in this work, B → π π l ν, can provide new insights into a long-standing puzzle concerning determinations of the Standard-Model parameter |Vub|, the smallest and least-well-known element of the Cabibbo-Kobayashi-Maskawa quark mixing matrix. The techniques introduced are widely applicable to many important processes in particle and nuclear physics, including B → K π μ+μ-, in which hints for deviations from the Standard Model of Particle Physics have been seen.