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Concerning this recent news from CERN:

CERN data on ‘beauty quarks’ behaviour may rewrite physics as we know it (TRT World, 24 March 2021)

My son and I (now 13yo) have been doing home based weighing and measuring experiments since he moved up to middle school in 2019. The idea of doing 'Physics' and experiments had captured his imagination so we started with pendulums and moved onto 'raspberry pi' based electronic weighing circuits in order to gain values for 'small g'. We found the data we gathered (see here) displayed a strong what turned out to be a tidal 'signal'. I then read that CERN suffered from a similar problem at the LHC presumably due to Lake Geneva.

My question is this: We calculated from our results and additional theories that we were witnessing a 353.7 (average) year figure for the tidal cycle (as a sub cycle of an 18.6 year full cycle) and that the 365.2 day solar cycle had little if nothing to do with our results even during the perihelion event usually in January each year. Could the issues that they are encountering concerning the decay of Muons (which I know little to nothing about, having only completed a level 3 course in Quantum Mechanics with the OU here in the UK, quite a few years ago) at CERN be more to do with their choice of year figure?

Emilio Pisanty
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John Davis
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Tides are due to the moon's pull, even on solid earth, since the crust is resting on a liquid core. They are called earth tides. This is long known at CERN and the beam lines have been corrected for decades in order to have the energy and positional accuracy they need, so, no, the measurements themselves are already corrected for the the tide.

This effect has been known since the LEP days, the Large Electron Positron collider, the LHC predecessor. The LHC reuses the same circular tunnel as LEP. Twenty some years ago, it then came as a surprise that, given the 27 km circumference of the accelerator, the gravitational force exerted by the moon on one side is not the same as the one felt at the opposite side, creating a small distortion of the tunnel. Since the moon’s effect is very small, only large bodies like oceans feel its effect in the form of tides. But the LHC is such a sensitive apparatus, it can detect the minute deformations created by the small differences in the gravitational force across its diameter. The effect is of course largest when the moon is full or during the new moon, when the sun and the moon combine their tidal forces for being all aligned with the earth. But the same happens twice a day like the tides and the operators must correct for it.

anna v
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  • To clarify, in the same article about the tidal signal CERN detailed how they adjusted for the tidal signal. I was wondering if the year figure of 365.2 days was significant in their calculation. If so then maybe they are not using the correct figure. NB/The tidal signal is electromagnetic and comparitively easy to detect. – John Davis May 31 '21 at 15:19
  • The LHC electronics are very well protected from external electromagnetic radiation, so could not show any variation due to days of the year. I do not understand your plot, and cannot comment. In general – anna v May 31 '21 at 16:09
  • Anna thanks for getting back to us. I know that the Geophys guys suffer with the tidal signal no matter how much they try and shield it out and compensate for it in their gravimeters. If they are using 365.2 days as a periodic figure for their results then this might give a different result in terms of averages than a different figure. So; if time period critical does the standard model revolve around a 365.2 day year? – John Davis May 31 '21 at 16:20
  • The data checked for the standard model of particle physics work with nanoseconds and nanometers. There is no larger time interval involved in this data or models. – anna v May 31 '21 at 16:24
  • Ok but they are saying that there is a surfit of one type or the other where they would expect even numbers in the standard model. This suggests an average figure over a macro time period. I believe the time quoted was since they started their experiments using the data they had so far... – John Davis May 31 '21 at 16:27
  • I do not think there is a possible way slight electromagnetic signal changes could affect the system of detecting the muons and electrons , it would increase the errors in momenta etc, if it is there, but not discrimination. – anna v May 31 '21 at 16:44
  • ok but if the data is taken from the last ten solar year this would be 10.325 tidal years might that be the adjustment that the figures need to yield an even number of events as required....? – John Davis May 31 '21 at 16:50
  • No, deciding if a track is a muon or an electron does not depend on possible errors in instruments, the errors in isntruments are mass indepent and also muons do not decay within the insturments and electrons leave a strong track signal in the detectors – anna v May 31 '21 at 17:00
  • I'm not suggesting that it is. I'm suggesting that the figures suggest differing results if you view the data set over different periods of time. Not because of error in reading but because the averages must be in terms of macro time so that as with other calculations the value for a year becomes significant. So; if the distribution is not as expected over a solar year then where is it as expected under the standard model? Does it normalise out over a significant amount of time? Is that massaging the figures? To me no. What makes it fit back into the Standard is worthy of consideration – John Davis May 31 '21 at 17:05
  • The theory has no variations in time with any connection to yearly calenders. The data , i.e. the electrical signals recorded might vary with time because of temperature changes etc which are taken into account by the error analysis of the measurements, and if, which is a big iff, the very small electromagnetic signals of the lake geneva changing over the year could affect the measurements, they also would be error corrections. From the millions of measurements tracks are reconstructed back to the interaction vertices, – anna v May 31 '21 at 17:55
  • and those tracks are assigned the identification of electron or muon by analysing detectors . What is an electron or a muon would not be affected by the very small energy of the possible radiation you are discussing. Here I shaw https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/303298/how-can-we-see-measure-detect-particles-during-experiments/303319#303319 an event in one of the detectors. – anna v May 31 '21 at 17:58
  • Okay thanks for all your help Anna much appreciated. I was thinking that there must be analysis which included some kind of averaging, standard deviation etc with respect to time for the ten years of data analysed. – John Davis May 31 '21 at 18:01
  • Hello, hope your still getting these. I've found the report (I think) see here https://arxiv.org/pdf/2103.11769.pdf. It looks to me (the layman) like you are using a normalised averaged figure see page 18 of the report page 20 of the pdf. As I say I am not a particle physicist but this data demographic figure 10 looks like a normalised average taken over the 10 years or over a number of measurements where there are some readings that are below and above the expected of 1 (unity) and many on the unity line; is that right? What I was asking above is if the average is taken over a 365.2 – John Davis Jul 07 '21 at 17:10
  • day year is there a possibility that taken over a different 'year' value that the anomaly is filtered out.... – John Davis Jul 07 '21 at 17:11
  • @JohnDavis It is not an average over years, it is testing different decays of B mesons to see how large the systematic errors are, You are asking if there is a time dependent systematic error, If the next experiment testing this. comes with no effect, al sort of guesses for possible systematics would be checked to find the discrepancy. The 5 sigma for declaring a signal is chosen to make this possibility very improbable. – anna v Jul 07 '21 at 18:50
  • It says "..relative to the average value of rJ/ψ.." also in a context which refers to natural Gaussian distribution so hence my confusion. Yeah, I read how they are using a 5 sigma to compensate for what they consider to be a large interference of some kind. So let us know what happens with the next one please.... – John Davis Jul 08 '21 at 11:23
  • Ok just saw on the news that the LHC returned a value of 9.2 which is within the standard model tolerence. That's good news but doesn't explain why the other values were being recorded..... – John Davis Jul 08 '21 at 19:21
  • Sorry that should read 0.992 +- 0.013 for value being nearly unity as required. – John Davis Jul 12 '21 at 15:44