Physics: the intuition of a fifth force becomes more and more real
The tantalizing theory that there may be a fifth force in nature has been given a boost thanks to the unexpected wobble of a subatomic particle, physicists have revealed.
According to current understanding, there are four fundamental forces in nature, three of which – the electromagnetic force and the strong and weak nuclear forces – are explained by the standard model of particle physics, therefore are predictable on the basis of this law and speaks of "unification of forces".
However, the model does not explain the other known fundamental force, gravity, or rather its explanation is not complete and requires the famous dark matter, which would make up 27% of the universe.
Now researchers have said there may be another, fifth , fundamental force of nature that would help explain the other four.
Dr Mitesh Patel, from Imperial College London, said: 'We're talking about a fifth force because we can't necessarily explain behavior [in these experiments] with the four we know about.'
The data comes from experiments at the US Fermilab particle accelerator facility, which explored how subatomic particles called muons — similar to electrons but about 200 times heavier — move in a magnetic field.
Patel says muons behave a bit like a child's top, spinning around the axis of the magnetic field. However, when muons move, they oscillate. The frequency of this oscillation should be predicted by the standard model of physics. We should be able to predict them.
But the experimental results of the FermiLab do not seem to correspond to these predictions.
The professor. Jon Butterworth of University College London, who works on the Atlas experiment at CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC), said: 'The wobbles are due to the way the muon interacts with a magnetic field. They can be calculated very precisely in the standard model, but that calculation involves quantum loops, with known particles appearing in those loops.
"If the measurements don't line up with the prediction, it could be a sign that there is some unknown particle appearing in the circuits – which could, for example, be the carrier of a fifth force."
The results follow previous work by FermiLab which showed similar results. If they were further confirmed there would be evidence that something is interacting with these particles, i.e. another force not predicted by the standard model. However, it is a question of constructing an ad hoc experiment to detect and measure this force, and this is the work of experimental physics.
The experiments at Fermilab aren't the only ones to suggest the possibility of a fifth force: work at the LHC has also yielded tantalizing results, albeit with a different kind of experiment looking at the rate at which muons and electrons are produced when certain particles they decay.
But Patel, who worked on the LHC experiments, said those results are now less consistent. In this case, however, the experiments had been aimed at other research, so the results do not appear perfectly consistent with those of Fermilab.
So we don't know what will be discovered, but if it is, it will be the most important discovery in physics in the last 100 years.
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The article Physics: the intuition of a fifth force becomes more and more real comes from Scenari Economici .
This is a machine translation of a post published on Scenari Economici at the URL https://scenarieconomici.it/fisica-lintuizione-di-una-quinta-forze-diventa-sempre-piu-reale/ on Sat, 12 Aug 2023 10:08:40 +0000.