Posted on 08/31/2015 7:42:51 PM PDT by Sir Gawain
This is a pretty big deal.
An international team of physicists has found hints of leptons - a specific type of subatomic particle - behaving in strange ways not predicted by the Standard Model. They uncovered this while looking at the decay of particles called B mesons into lighter particles, including two types of leptons: the tau lepton and the muon.
According to a key Standard Model concept called 'lepton universality', all leptons are treated equally by all fundamental forces, which means that all leptons should decay at the same rate, once corrected for any difference in mass. But in the data, the team found a small but notable difference in the predicted rates of decay. This suggests that some type of as-yet undiscovered forces or particles could be interfering.
"The Standard Model says the world interacts with all leptons in the same way. There is a democracy there. But there is no guarantee that this will hold true if we discover new particles or new forces," one of the lead researchers, Hassan Jawahery, from the University of Maryland in the US, said in a press release. "Lepton universality is truly enshrined in the Standard Model. If this universality is broken, we can say that we've found evidence for non-standard physics."
It would be tempting to disregard this finding as an anomaly, if it wasn't for the fact that a similar discovery about lepton decay was made by the BaBar experiment at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Centre in the US in 2012. This experiment also looked at the decay of B mesons, but it achieved this decay by smashing together electrons, rather than the protons that power the LHC.
"The experiments were done in totally different environments, but they reflect the same physical model. This replication provides an important independent check on the observations," University of Maryland physicist Brian Hamilton explained. "The added weight of two experiments is the key here. This suggests that it's not just an instrumental effect - it's pointing to real physics."
The team now needs to confirm their observations with further experiments. The data used for this research were collected during the first run of the LHC between 2011 and 2012 - the same run that found the Higgs boson, which was the last missing piece of the Standard Model. But now that the particle accelerator is on its second run and achieving record-breaking energy levels, they'll have an even better chance of catching the decay in action again.
"We are planning a range of other measurements. The LHCb experiment is taking more data during the second run right now," said Jawahery. "Any knowledge from here on helps us learn more about how the universe evolved to this point. For example, we know that dark matter and dark energy exist, but we don't yet know what they are or how to explain them. Our result could be a part of that puzzle ... If we can demonstrate that there are missing particles and interactions beyond the Standard Model, it could help complete the picture."
The results will be published in the September 4 issue of Physical Review Letters, but have been published on arXiv ahead of time. We can't wait to see what researchers at the LHC find next.
There are actually scientists saying it could open a dimensional portal. When you have Hawking worried...
It’s like Maxwell electromagnetic equations that first united the electric and magnetic field. Back then you would have been one that said, “So what “
Well all electric and electronic devices that have been developed as the result of those equations is the “so what”.
TY
If we ever travel to the stars, it will be due to research like this.
My 2 cents...
It took number theory about 2500 years to become useful, but encryption is nice.
And here I was worried about illegal Mexican immigrants.
“Besides scratching the curiosity itch, how does this benefit humanity?”
It will eventually fundamentally alter most of mankind’s technologies and economies even far more so than occurred when began to switch over technologies utilizing electricity and nuclear fission. Cheap energy production utilizing antimatter and/or zero point quantum mechanical sources may reduce the cost of energy to the point where any form of garbage can be safely recycled into their fundamental atomic elements and/or subatomic particles. Significant industrial and sewer pollution can be virtually eliminated. Seawater will be very economically desalinated in any desired quantities. Transportation technologies will be fundamentally improved by fantastically lower energy costs, super-strong yet lightweight materials, and perhaps a new found ability to exercise some control of gravity. The chemical and electronics industries will be revolutionized in countless ways given new found abilities to control chemical, magnetic, and nuclear forces. Their innovations in turn will enable new medical technologies and materials for use by medicine to replace defective body parts and combat pathogens. Container ships may become super submarines to avoid surface marine weather. Quantum mechanical computers and other electronics fundamentally later every industry....
How on earth will the discovery of semiconductivity, a mere “dirt effect” in solid state physics, ever benefit mankind? Nope, won’t happen.
That’s why the US lost the Super Conducting Super Collider project in the mid 90’s. It would’ve far more powerful than the LHC. However, some idiots didn’t care.
Benefits might be anti-gravity, zero point energy, and who knows what else.
The loss of the SSC stung me personally. I moved to Texas to work on that project.
“There are actually scientists saying it could open a dimensional portal. When you have Hawking worried...”
Your post on this thread intrigued me the most. Both regarding a dimensional portal and having Hawking worried. Would you happen to have a link to either of those? I am fascinated by this. Thanks!
From CERN:
http://home.web.cern.ch/about/physics/extra-dimensions-gravitons-and-tiny-black-holes
http://press.web.cern.ch/backgrounders/extra-dimensions
https://www.rt.com/op-edge/313922-cern-collider-hadron-higgs/
For the most interesting angle:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e62z5zJjp2I
An international team of physicists has found hints of leptons - a specific type of subatomic particle - behaving in strange ways not predicted by the Standard Model.
Eh. I was bored.
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