Rare beauty - are we seeing signs of new physics at the LHCb experiment?

Rare beauty - are we seeing signs of new physics at the LHCb experiment? Harry Cliff, University of Cambridge Physics Colloquium 2021-04-01 When the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) began its physics programme over a decade ago, there were high hopes that new particles or other phenomena would be discovered in its high energy collisions. Supersymmetric particles, dark matter, micro black holes were all targets of the new machine, and yet, despite hundreds of searches performed by thousands of physicists over the past ten years, no signs of physics beyond the Standard Model of particle physics have been found. However, in the past few years, several intriguing anomalies in the decays of beauty quarks have been reported by the LHCb experiment. Could these anomalies be the long-awaited evidence for ‘new physics’? In this talk, I will explore the physics programme of the LHCb experiment, the latest status of these anomalies, and what they could mean for the future of high energy physics.