CERN (Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire), the world’s largest particle physics laboratory, located on the Swiss and French border, continues its work. Finally, scientists who made a statement about a project they carried out announced that they had discovered a new “natural power”.
Researchers think they’ve discovered a new force of nature with the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) that could explain why certain atomic particles behave unexpectedly. This research is also thought to be revolutionary, which could change our understanding of the fundamentals of physics.
What exactly does the LHC do?
At the start of more than a decade, CERN sought to discover the secrets of the universe by examining the smallest particles of matter colliding with the LHD at nearly the speed of light. He discovered the Higgs boson, a theoretical particle that previously gave the mass of matter. But the project hasn’t shed much light on how the building blocks of matter work so far.
There was great excitement around the world in March when the LHC presented evidence for a potentially new force of nature, new physics. The best current theory of particles and forces is known as the standard model, which describes with unmistakable accuracy everything we know about the physical things that make up the world around us. While this theory is the most coherent so far, there is no doubt that it has shortcomings.
Beauty quarks, sometimes called bottom quarks, are elementary particles that make up larger particles. Quarks seem to decay into another type of lepton (muon) less frequently than they decay into electrons. The standard model predicts that beauty quarks will decay into muons at the same rate as electrons.
What has CERN found about this new force of nature?
The authors of this week’s study on The Conversation site said that the only way these decays could occur at different rates is if some never-before-seen particles were involved in the decay and knocked flakes against muons. Until recently, there was not enough data to say definitively what was going on inside the LHC.
CERN
In 2019, scientists rerun the beauty quarks experiment from 2014 with additional input collected in the intervening years. When the result was finally revealed, the data showed that for every 100 electron decays, there are about 85 muon decays. The researchers said the result is very unlikely to be a coincidence.
The site authors say the varying rate of decay may be the result of a “Z prime” particle, which is essentially a new force of nature. They also explained that since this force is quite weak, it is normal not to see any signs so far.
Chris Parkes, spokesman for the University of Manchester and CERN LHCb, said that if the results are confirmed, it will require a new physical process, such as the existence of new fundamental particles or interactions. The researchers explained that more experiments are needed to confirm the results. However, if the data is confirmed, they stated that there will be enough evidence to solve the mystery that lies beyond the current model.
What do you think about this power of nature, which is thought to be newly discovered by CERN? You can share it with us in the comments.
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