Muons and Electrons Rare Beauty decay

Question

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?

Answer 1

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.