Interpreting Hints for Lepton Flavor Universality Violation

Understand

We interpret the recent hints for lepton flavor universality violation in rare $B$ meson decays.

• Based on a model-independent effective Hamiltonian approach, we determine regions of new physics parameter space that give a good description of the experimental data on $R_K$ and $R_{K^*}$, which is in tension with Standard Model predictions.
• We suggest further measurements that can help narrowing down viable new physics explanations.
• We stress that the measured values of $R_K$ and $R_{K^*}$ are fully compatible with new physics explanations of other anomalies in rare $B$ meson decays based on the $b \to s \mu\mu$ transition.