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The big explanation physicists use to explain how the universe works may have some big new flaws that will be patched after an elementary particle is found to have more mass than scientists thought.
“It’s nothing wrong,” he said. Dave TobackA particle physicist at Texas A&M University and spokesperson for the US government’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, which runs the experiments, Dr. “It literally means that something fundamental is wrong with our understanding of nature.”
Physicists in the lab have been putting particles together over the course of a decade and have measured the mass of bosons at 4 million W. These subatomic particles are responsible for a fundamental force at the center of atoms and exist for only a fraction of a second before decaying into other particles.
“They are constantly moving in and out of existence in the quantum foam of the universe” Back said.
According to research published Thursday in the journal Science by a team of 400 scientists from around the world, the difference in mass is too large to be a rounding error or anything else that can be easily explained, than predicted by the prevailing theory of the universe. .
The scientists say the result is so extraordinary that it needs to be confirmed by another experiment. If approved, it would present one of the biggest problems with scientists’ elaborate cosmos rulebook called the standard model.
Duke University physicist Ashutosh V. Kotwal, who was the project leader for the analysis, said it’s like discovering there’s a secret room in your home.
The scientists speculated that there might be an undiscovered particle interacting with the W boson that could explain the difference. Perhaps dark matter, another poorly understood component of the universe, may be playing a role. Or maybe there’s new physics they don’t understand right now, the researchers said.
The standard model says that a W boson should measure 80,357,000 electron volts, plus or minus six.
“We found a little more than that. Not that much, but enough,” said Giorgio Chiarelli, another scientist on the Fermi team and research director of the Italian National Institute of Nuclear Physics. The Fermi team’s scale placed the W boson at a higher 80,433,000 electron volts, plus or minus nine.
It doesn’t seem like a big difference, but in the subatomic world it is a huge difference.
But both the team and experts not involved in the study said such a big claim requires extra evidence from a second team they don’t yet have.
“This incredibly accurate measurement requires an understanding of various calibrations of various small effects,” said particle physicist Claudio Campagnari of the University of California Santa Barbara, who was not part of the Fermi team. “These guys are really good. And I take them very seriously. But I think what we need at the end of the day is to verify with another experiment.”
Less precise measurements of the W boson by other teams previously found it to be lighter than predicted, so “perhaps there’s something strange about this experiment,” said Caltech physicist Sean M. Carroll, who was not part of the research. It’s the phrase “definitely worth taking very seriously”.
The finding is significant because of its potential impact on the standard model of physics.
“Nature has facts,” said Duke’s Kotwal. “The model is the way we understand these realities.”
Scientists have known for a long time that the standard model is not perfect. It doesn’t explain dark matter or gravity well. The researchers said that if scientists need to step in and tinker with it to explain these findings, they need to make sure they don’t blow up mathematical equations that explain and predict other particles and forces well.
It is a recurring problem with the model. A year ago a different team found another problem with the standard model and how muons respond.
“Quantum mechanics is really beautiful and weird” Back said. “No one who hasn’t been deeply disturbed by quantum mechanics has understood it.”
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