This is an explainer of my recent paper, written with my colleague here at Rutgers David Shih, and David’s graduate student, Pouya Asadi. This is a follow-up in some sense to our previous collaboration, which for various reasons I wasn’t able to write up when it came out earlier this year.

This paper concerns itself with the RDRD and RD∗RD∗ anomalies, so I better start off explaining what those are. The Standard Model has three “generations” of matter particles which are identical except for their masses. The lightest quarks are the up and down, then the charm and strange, and finally the heaviest pair, the top and bottom. The electron has the muon and the tau as progressively heavier partners. The heavier particles can decay into a lighter version only through the interaction with a WW boson — these are the only “flavor changing” processes in the Standard Model.