Light-front holographic QCD and exclusive B decays

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The Standard Model (SM) of particle physics has successfully withstood decades of intensive testing culminating in the long-awaited discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012 at the LHC. Yet, we know that the SM is incomplete since it does not accommodate gravity and neither does it account for neutrino oscillations, dark matter and for the matter/antimatter asymmetry. Despite intensive efforts, to this date no New Physics (NP) discoveries have been made at the LHC. However, an intriguing number of anomalies, i.e. discrepancies between the data and SM predictions, have been reported in rare exclusive B decays. These are decays of the B meson (containing a heavy b quark) to a lighter meson (no b quark) accompanied by a photon or a pair of leptons. These exclusive decays are relatively clean to measure experimentally but the theory behind them is challenging. There are two reasons for this: first, although we are able to compute (using perturbation theory) the underlying b-quark decay in the SM, our final predictions for observables have a residual dependence on an energy scale called the renormalization scale thus introducing a systematic uncertainty. Secondly, quarks and gluons are permanently confined into mesons and this has to be carefully accounted for using non-perturbative methods.