https://doi.org/10.1140/epjc/s10052-022-10566-9
Regular Article - Theoretical Physics
On the superiority of the
plots over the unitarity triangle plots in the 2020s
1
TUM Institute for Advanced Study, Lichtenbergstr. 2a, 85747, Garching, Germany
2
Physik Department, TU München, James-Franck-Straße, 85748, Garching, Germany
Received:
5
May
2022
Accepted:
29
June
2022
Published online:
13
July
2022
The unitarity triangle (UT) plots played already for three decades an important role in the tests of the Standard Model (SM) and the determination of the CKM parameters. As of 2022, among the four CKM parameters, and
are already measured with respectable precision, while this is not the case of
and
. In the case of
the main obstacle are the significant tensions between its inclusive and exclusive determinations from tree-level decays and it could still take some years before a unique value of this parameter will be known. The present uncertainty in
of
from tree-level decays will be reduced to
by the LHCb and Belle II collaborations in the coming years. Unfortunately in the common UT plots
is not seen and the experimental improvements in the determination of
from tree-level decays at the level of a few degrees are difficult to appreciate. In view of these deficiencies of the UT plots with respect to
and
and the central role these two CKM parameters will play in this decade, the recently proposed plots of
versus
extracted from various processes appear to be superior to the UT plots in the flavour phenomenology of the 2020s. We illustrate this idea with
observables
,
,
and with rare decays
,
,
and
. In particular the power of
,
and
in the determination of
, due to their strong dependence on
, is transparently exhibited in this manner. Combined with future reduced errors on
and
from tree-level decays such plots can better exhibit possible inconsistencies between various determinations of these two parameters, caused by new physics, than it is possible with the UT plots. This can already be illustrated on the example of the recently found
anomaly in
.
© The Author(s) 2022
Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
Funded by SCOAP3. SCOAP3 supports the goals of the International Year of Basic Sciences for Sustainable Development.