Is a dangerous crack appearing in the beautiful edifice of particle physics? More specifically, is the current theory, known as the Standard Model, which has so far fully described all phenomena of infinite smallness completely wrongly for the first time? The LHCb International Experiment, which was installed at CERN in Switzerland on the LHC underground, has just posted the most accurate picture of an indicator pointing in this direction.
But is it just the plaster that is cracking or the wall itself moving? It’s too early to tell, because these results could be explained by chance as well: drawing an unnatural sequence of double sixes does not necessarily mean the dice are loaded. “There is a 1 in 1000 chance that our result will still be fully consistent with the standard model.”A spokesman for Chris Parks LHCb, Who is the Summarize his conclusions During a teleconference at CERN, Tuesday 23 March.
Therefore, the researchers noted an anomaly in their detector of 20 meters, 4,500 tons. The LHC accelerator violently pushes beams of protons, the main components of ordinary matter, against each other. Among the debris, in 2012, CERN identified the Higgs boson, which is the last particle to complete the Standard Model. But other particles are produced. Some of them, called mesons, can degrade into other particles that the LHCb experiment calculated.
Rarely does one of these mesons disappear in a particular way, on the order of once in a million collisions. Either by emitting a pair of electrons and anti-electrons. Or a pair of muons and antimony (a cousin of an electron twice its weight).
Lipton Universality
The Standard Model predicts that these two fates are equally likely and that specialists speak “Global leptonism” (Electrons and muons belonging to the Lipton family). But experience shows that the first is 15% more frequent than the second … and this difference, if confirmed, can only be explained by adding new laws, new forces, or completely new particles outside the current framework. Then will be the foundations that will move.
“I’m cautiously excited.”, Sums up Chris Parks, who remembers that other experiments such as BaBar in the US, Belle in Japan, or the others in CERN, Atlas and CMS have already found evidence in the same direction, although less accurate. “It’s more satisfying than excitement, because these results really go in the direction of the other data. Remember Sebastian Discus Jenon, deputy director of the Irene Julio-Curie Laboratory for Physics of Infinity (Orsay). But with that accuracy, a psychological threshold might have been crossed. “
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