Unexpected boson measurement threatens the standard model of physics

After a decade of accurate measurements, scientists found the elementary particle on Thursday – W. Boson It has more weight than the theory that shook the foundation of our understanding of how the universe works.

These are the foundations on which Standard Form In particle physics, this is the best theory of scientists to describe the basic building blocks of the universe and what forces control them.

The W boson controls what is called the weak force The four basic forces Natural, thus the pillar of the standard model.

But a new search Posted To know He said the most accurate measurement made for the W boson was directly contrary to the model’s predictions.

Ashutosh Kotwal, a physicist at Duke University who led the study, told AFP that it took more than 400 scientists over 10 years to study four million candidate bosons “from a database of about 450 trillion collisions.”

These collisions – occur by crushing particles together at a dazzling pace for reading – Deutron collision In the state of Illinois in the United States.

The particle accelerator was the most powerful in the world until 2009, when it was replaced The big Hadron collision Near Geneva, which is named for care Higgs boson After a few years.

DeVotron ceased operations in 2011, but scientists at the Collider Detector (CDF) at Fermilap have been counting the numbers ever since.

Diagram showing the basic particles of a static model. (Scientific warning)

‘Cracks’ in the model

The standard model is “probably the most successful of the scientific theories ever written,” said Harry Cliff, a particle physicist at the University of Cambridge, who works on the Large Hadron collision.

“It can make amazingly accurate predictions,” he said. But if these predictions are proven wrong, the model alone cannot be changed.

“It’s like a cardboard house. You pull a part of it so hard that it all breaks,” Cliff told AFP.

The standard model is not without its complications.

For example, not taken into account Dark matterIt’s together Dark energy It is believed to be 95 percent of the universe. Because it also says that the universe does not have to be first The big bang He must have destroyed himself.

Furthermore, the physicists added that “some cracks were recently discovered in the model”. To know Article – Commodity.

“In the structure of these clues as to whether there are missing pieces in the standard model, we have provided another very important and somewhat substantial source,” Godwal said.

“This is a big discovery or a problem in data analysis,” said Jean Stark, a physicist and director of research at the French CNRS Institute, who expects “heated discussions in the coming years.”

“Extraordinary allegations require extraordinary evidence,” he told the AFP.

‘Big deal’

CDF scientists said they determined the mass of the W boson with 0.01 percent accuracy – twice the accuracy of previous attempts.

They compared it to a gorilla weighing 350 kilograms (800 pounds) and 40 grams (1.5 ounces).

They found that the boson differed from the standard model’s prediction by seven fixed deviations, also known as sigma.

If you flip a coin, “the chances of getting a five sigma result by luck are one in three and a half million,” Cliff said.

“If this is true, and there is no misunderstanding of how proper bias or calculations are made, this is a big deal because it has a new fundamental component that we have never discovered before in our universe,” he said.

“But if you say something as big as we’ve broken the standard model of particle physics, we need to find more new particles, to convince people that more than one measurement is needed from multiple experiments.”

“Now the theoretical physics community and other experiments are pursuing this and shedding light on this mystery,” said CDF spokesman David Dubak.

After a decade of measurements, the code has not yet been made.

“We follow the clues and do nothing without turning it around, so we’ll find out what that means.”

© AFP