‘Tantalizing’ results of 2 experiments defy physics rulebook
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Preliminary results from two experiments suggest something could be wrong with the basic way physicists think the universe works, a prospect that has the field of particle physics both baffled and thrilled.
Tiny particles called muons aren’t quite doing what is expected of them in two different long-running experiments in the United States and Europe. The confounding results—if proven right—reveal major problems with the rulebook physicists use to describe and understand how the universe works at the subatomic level.
“We think we might be swimming in a sea of background particles all the time that just haven’t been directly discovered,” Fermilab experiment co-chief scientist Chris Polly said in a press conference. “There might be monsters we haven’t yet imagined that are emerging from the vacuum interacting with our muons and this gives us a window into seeing them.”
The rulebook, called the Standard Model, was developed about 50 years ago. Experiments performed over decades affirmed over and again that its descriptions of the particles and the forces that make up and govern the universe were pretty much on the mark. Until now.
“New particles, new physics might be just beyond our research,” said Wayne State University particle physicist Alexey Petrov. “It’s tantalizing.”
The United States Energy Department’s Fermilab announced results Wednesday of 8.2 billion races along a track outside Chicago that while ho-hum to most people have physicists astir: The muons’ magnetic fields don’t seem to be what the Standard Model says they should be. This follows new results published last month from the European Center for Nuclear Research’s Large Hadron Collider that found a surprising proportion of particles in the aftermath of high-speed collisions.
If confirmed, the U.S. results would be the biggest finding in the bizarre world of subatomic particles in nearly 10 years, since the discovery of the Higgs boson, often called the “God particle,” said Aida El-Khadra of the University of Illinois, who works on theoretical physics for the Fermilab experiment.
Fermilab near Chicago. Image: Wikimedia Commons
The point of the experiments, explains Johns Hopkins University theoretical physicist David Kaplan, is to pull apart particles and find out if there’s “something funny going on” with both the particles and the seemingly empty space between them.
“The secrets don’t just live in matter. They live in something that seems to fill in all of space and time. These are quantum fields,” Kaplan said. “We’re putting energy into the vacuum and seeing what comes out.”
Both sets of results involve the strange, fleeting particle called the muon. The muon is the heavier cousin to the electron that orbits an atom’s center. But the muon is not part of the atom, it is unstable and normally exists for only two microseconds. After it was discovered in cosmic rays in 1936 it so confounded scientists that a famous physicist asked “Who ordered that?”
“Since the very beginning it was making physicists scratch their heads,” said Graziano Venanzoni, an experimental physicist at an Italian national lab, who is one of the top scientists on the U.S. Fermilab experiment, called Muon g-2.
The experiment sends muons around a magnetized track that keeps the particles in existence long enough for researchers to get a closer look at them. Preliminary results suggest that the magnetic “spin” of the muons is 0.1% off what the Standard Model predicts. That may not sound like much, but to particle physicists it is huge—more than enough to upend current understanding.
Researchers need another year or two to finish analyzing the results of all of the laps around the 50-foot (14-meter) track. If the results don’t change, it will count as a major discovery, Venanzoni said.
Separately, at the world’s largest atom smasher at CERN, physicists have been crashing protons against each other there to see what happens after. One of the particle colliders’ several separate experiments measures what happens when particles called beauty or bottom quarks collide.
The Standard Model predicts that these beauty quark crashes should result in equal numbers of electrons and muons. It’s sort of like flipping a coin 1,000 times and getting about equal numbers of heads and tails, said Large Hadron Collider beauty experiment chief Chris Parkes.
The LHCb experiment inside the Large Hadron Collier. Image: Cern
But that’s not what happened.
Researchers pored over the data from several years and a few thousand crashes and found a 15% difference, with significantly more electrons than muons, said experiment researcher Sheldon Stone of Syracuse University.
Neither experiment is being called an official discovery yet because there is still a tiny chance that the results are statistical quirks. Running the experiments more times—planned in both cases—could, in a year or two, reach the incredibly stringent statistical requirements for physics to hail it as a discovery, researchers said.
If the results do hold, they would upend “every other calculation made” in the world of particle physics, Kaplan said.
“This is not a fudge factor. This is something wrong,” Kaplan said. That something could be explained by a new particle or force.
Or these results may be mistakes. In 2011, a strange finding that a particle called a neutrino seemed to be traveling faster than light threatened the model, but it turned out to be the result of a loose electrical connection problem in the experiment.
“We checked all our cable connections and we’ve done what we can to check our data,” Stone said. “We’re kind of confident, but you never know.”
See more here: phys.org
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Val
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It’s another example showing that Science is never ‘settled’ .
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Herb Rose
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Do not worry. In the magical kingdom of Quantum when ever a beauty is in danger from a monster Quark a gallant sir New Particle will arrive on his trusty steed New Force to save the day. Particle physics is the reading tea leaves of science, you see what you want to see.
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Charles Higley
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This is like black holes. There are about nine different black hole models because none of them work in the real Universe. So, they shelve the problem and go looking for black holes anyway. There is a clear ignoring of the electromagnetic aspects of matter in the Universe and the fact that several major minds, including Einstein, Oppenheimer, and even NASA say that black holes do not exist.
This is a case of taking the mathematics and extrapolating to infinities, which is not how the real Universe works—there are limits. Taking the idea of infinite gravity, they cobbled up black holes.
Instead, they should be measuring the Universe and limiting their math to match what they see. It’s like looking at a horse and wagon, extrapolating the horse-power to infinity, and then going looking for superhorses. Really.
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Carbon Bigfoot
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Herb you should have said….his trusty UNICORN flatulating its fairy dust particles to save the day.
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Robert Beatty
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Interesting comment:
“We think we might be swimming in a sea of background particles all the time that just haven’t been directly discovered,” Fermilab experiment co-chief scientist Chris Polly said in a press conference. “There might be monsters we haven’t yet imagined that are emerging from the vacuum interacting with our muons and this gives us a window into seeing them.”
Maybe we should call it gravity? Taking a step back, the experiment fires a high energy proton at a carbon atom and observes a neutrino and positron emerging.
This experiment mirrors what happens at a black hole, but via a different mechanism. The BH causes particles to seperate, because of intense gravity, whereas this experiment uses high energy protons to create a similar result.
The CERN investigation has found a missing 15% of muons in a similar high speed experiment. IMO the missing particles have been absorbed by free neutrons created during the CERN investigation and finish up stabilising the neutrons?
More details at https://bosmin.com//PSL/NEGATRONS.pdf
I wonder if people at CERN or Fermilab read PSI? It would be interesting to read a comment on these thoughts.
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Charles Higley
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We are supposed to be swimming in a sea of virtual neutrinos. Then, they explain inertia by claiming that, when you push something in this sea, it resists the motion and thus a force feels resistance. If you are not pushing, the sea is stagnant and invisible. Yeah, got it. Wow.
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Karma Singh
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As it says in the Mahabarata; this is an inherently mutable universe.
A desire to find such particles creates them. It is THIS ability which requires urgent study, not the effects.
Blessed be
Karma Singh
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JaKo
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Well, I always thought that going beyond the Neutron, Proton and Electron Theory was, at best, a conjecture.
Then “we found” that observing some liddle rascals may affect them; OK, don’t we all kinda change our behavior when knowing we’re “observed?”
And then this: “Don’t be wishing for anything unless you’re prepared for dealing with it…”
OK: “Our Father who art in heaven…” or “Hey, let’s go back to the atom of fire or sweetness…”
Why am I not worried about this and rather go to count the tanks facing each other in eastern Ukraine? And I did not even wish for that…
Cheers, JaKo
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Herb Rose
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Hi Jako,
The neutron is a subatomic molecule, just as the alpha particle is. It is created when a proton and electron come together, producing energy, and when it spontaneously decomposes it returns to a proton, electron, and a beta ray (energy). How can both the formation and destruction produce energy?
Herb
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Karma Singh
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Hi Herb,
easy, my mum used to have a friend like that: She was always moving about because it was too cold or fanning herself because it was too warm. Her name was Gertrude (I don’t know why).
Exothermism in action – what more evidence to you need?
Blessed be
Karma Singh
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JaKo
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Hi Herb,
It seems to be funnier than that: A free neutron has half-life ~10minutes and while it does decompose to a proton and electron (which is the beta radiation BTW) there is another liddle rascal — “electron anti-neutrino” spewed out (of thin air — so to speak) and, no, I’m not making this stuff up and do not even mention the Quarks (or is it Quacks) — these are behind it all, going up-and-down with energy and funny particles absorbed and emitted at will… I wouldn’t want to go through the “Nuclear and Sub-Nuclear Physics 302” today, to me it’s worse than even the LGBTQXYZ+
Cheers, JaKo
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Herb Rose
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Hi Jako,
I’m not sure half life applies to neutrons since they either are or aren’t.
I should have said gamma ray for the energy released in neutron decay. It becomes beta decay of an atoms nucleus (even though there are no electrons in an atom’s nucleus).
I think nuclear physics is just a misspelling of unclear physics. How can you have both the creation of a nucleus (fusion) and the destruction of the nucleus (fission) produce energy? Can you split a helium atom then use a portion of the energy released to reform the helium atom producing even more energy?
Herb