Fermilab
You’ve probably heard of protons, positive spots that anchor people. You have probably encountered electrons, negative blips orbiting these protons. You may have even thought about photons, the things that come out of light bulbs in your room. But right now, we have to worry about a weird little particle that usually escapes the limelight: the W boson. Along with its partner in crime, the Z boson, the W boson dictates what is called a “weak force”. I will save you from the rabbit hole for how weak force works, because it includes the physics that will explode our minds. Trust me. Just know that without the weak force, the sun would virtually stop burning. After all, there is drama with the W boson. According to an article published Thursday in the journal Science, 10 years of unimaginably accurate data suggest that the particle is more massive than our physics predicts. If you are not a natural, at first glance, this may sound trivial. But it’s actually a major problem for πάντα everything. More specifically, it causes a paradox for the Standard Model of Particle Physics, a well-established, evolving theory that explains how all the particles in the universe behave – protons, electrons, photons, even those we do not really hear like gluons, muons, I could go on. The W boson is also there. “It’s one of the cornerstones of the Standard Model,” said Giorgio Chiarelli, research director at the Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare in Italy and co-author of the study. But here’s the essence of the Standard Model. It is like a world of symbiotic particles. Think of each particle in the model as a string, perfectly organized to tie everything together. If a string is too tight, things start to get tired – it doesn’t matter which string. Therefore, the Standard Model provides some parameters for each “string” or particle, and a very important one is the mass of the W boson. Simply put, if this particle were not equal to this mass, the rest of the model would not work well enough. And if that were true, we would have to change the model – we would have to change our understanding of how all the particles in the universe work. So, do you remember the new paper? We are more or less entering the worst case scenario. An image of the particles in the typical model. Fermilab A decade of calculations, measurements, cross-checks, scratches on the head and deep breathing by about 400 international researchers have concluded that the W boson is slightly heavier than the Standard Model predicts. “It’s not a big difference, but we can really see that it’s different,” said David Toback, a particle physicist at Texas A&M University and co-author of the study. “Something is wrong”. You may be wondering if we are sure of this. The scientific community has had the same reaction, which is why researchers are now focusing on the laser to confirm that this larger mass of boson W is really true. “We may have done it wrong,” Toback said. But he quickly added: “We do not believe it.” It is because, as Toback explains, the team “measured this tiny difference with such incredible accuracy that it comes out like a sore thumb.” And fascinatingly, these measurements look a bit like subtraction in crime scene style.
Paying attention to what is missing
To get a W boson in the first place, you literally have to crush two protons together. This produces a number of other Standard Model particles and scientists just have to hope that one of them is what they want to look at. (In this case, this is the W boson). For the new measurements, the researchers used collision data from a now-defunct particle accelerator at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Illinois. Fortunately, he made some W bosons, and in fact, had enough W boson data to get about four times the amount used in previous measurements. Set of bets. But there is a complication. The W boson is elusive. It breaks down quickly into two smaller particles, so you can not measure it directly. One of them is either an electron or a muon, which can be measured directly, but the other is arguably more bizarre than the boson itself W: A neutrino. Neutrinos are aptly called “ghost particles” because they touch nothing. They are zooming in even at the moment, but you can not understand it because they do not touch the people who make up your body. Spooky, I know. This eerie hurdle means that scientists need to be creative. Enter, the art of discounting. Once the neutrinos disappear, they leave behind a kind of hole. “The neutrino imprint lacks energy,” Chiarelli said. “This tells us where the neutrino went and how much energy was carried away.” It’s somewhat the same idea as an x-ray. “The x-ray is passing, but for the point where you have a piece of metal, you can see the shape,” Chiarelli said. The “shape” is the “missing energy”. Aerial view of the accelerator since 1999. Fermilab After decoding the neutrino, the scientists used a set of complex equations to add it to the electron or muon data. This resulted in the total mass of the W boson. This measurement was made many, many times to make sure everything was as accurate as possible. In addition, all data were supported by theoretical calculations that have matured since the last time the W boson was measured. However… there is another complication. As with all scientific research, there is no right or wrong answer. There is only the answer. But as with all human thought, there is the possibility of bias and the team did not want to fall victim to such a personal mistake. Toback quotes Sherlock Holmes as explaining the group’s mentality: “One has to find theories that match the facts, not facts that fit the theories.” “Is it more stressful?” observed. “Yes, but nature does not care about my anxiety. What we want is to know the answer.” Therefore, not only did the team do a double, triple, quadruple check of their data, but it did so while it was completely blind to the final answer. When he opened the box with the result of boson mass W, everyone would look at it for the first time. Soon in the year 2020, when the volumes are high, the box finally opens and the mass of the W boson is in clear contrast to the prediction of the Standard Model. “It was not an Eureka moment,” Chiarelli said. “It was a pretty sober moment. We were skeptical. Science is organized into skepticism.” But over time, that skepticism has waned and here we are.
All this seems very stable. And now what?
In a sense, this information has been coming for a long time. “We know from the beginning that the Standard Model cannot be the absolute theory,” Chiarelli said. For example, the Standard Model is known to be unable to explain gravity, dark matter, and many other intangible aspects of our universe. One idea is that this new information about the mass of the W boson may mean that we need to add some particles to the Standard Model to explain the change. This, in turn, could affect what we know about the famous Higgs boson, or “god particle”, which was finally spotted in 2012 and met with shocking applause. “But we are not there,” Tobak said. “That would be pure speculation.” And, instead of speculating, Toback and Chiarelli agree that we should just follow the facts, even if we know that the facts will one day lead us to a new fundamental theory of particle physics. “It’s like moving in the dark,” Chiarelli said. “You know there is a way that is right, but you do not know where; maybe our measurement can give us the right direction to move.” Get the CNET Science newsletter Unlock the biggest mysteries on our planet and not only with the CNET Science newsletter. Delivered Monday.
