A new lever on the standard model?

Written By: - Date published: 8:51 am, April 12th, 2021 - 10 comments
Categories: science - Tags:

For me the most notable thing about the last week hasn’t been the repetitive and ill-informed braying from the opposition about covid-19. It has been about the announcement that Fermilab in the US has partially confirmed that there may be a wobble in the behaviour of muons. The probability of the experimental result being a statistical variation is now 1 in 40,000 – or 4.2 sigma. Not quite up to the 5 sigma – but definitely showing promise of a lever into the 1970s standard model of physics.

The digest that I get from National Geographic editorialised the observation like this:-

By Victoria Jaggard, SCIENCE executive editor

One of the things I love about particle physics is how much scientists really want to find cracks in some of their most widely accepted theories. Doing science means coming up with a hypothesis, testing it, and seeing if the results match your predictions. The more times you come up with the same answer, especially via different types of tests, the more likely it is that the hypothesis is correct. Gather enough evidence for related hypotheses, and you are on the path to developing a theory.

In most fields, having observations match your theory is a big win. But for particle physicists, finding a result that does not match predictions is when things really get interesting.

Specifically, physicists have been hoping for such a mismatch in the foundational theory of particle physics, called the standard model. This is the mathematical framework that describes the subatomic particles and forces that make up the universe. So far, test after test shows particles behaving exactly as the math predicts, and in 2012, experiments at the Large Hadron Collider added another entirely expected brick to the standard model in the form of the Higgs boson. That’s a problem, because the math we have can’t account for a few key components of the universe, including a little thing called gravity. Clearly, something somewhere is off, but we have not been able to put our metaphorical finger on it for decades, and that means our basic understanding of everything around us is flawed.

Now, at last, the latest test at Fermilab in Illinois (pictured above) reveals one particle, the muon, acting funny enough that it has scientists on the edge of their collective chairs. As our Michael Greshko puts it, this odd muon behavior “is a major hint that the universe contains unseen particles and forces beyond our current grasp.” Future tests may not only strengthen the case, but they may also finally show scientists how to get multiple cosmic theories to align and merge.

“This has been a long time coming, this result. Many of us have been working on it for decades,” University of Manchester physicist Mark Lancaster tells Greshko. “It’s more a feeling of relief than anything else.”

National Geographic Newsletter, Science : April 07 2021

You can find a more detailed National Geographic article at “New experiment hints that a particle breaks the known laws of physics“. But that editorial is a close to perfect description of the most scientific striving – and why scientists, especially physicists, are the worlds major sceptics (unlike the people* politely described by Alison Campbell in ‘“doing my own research” & the scientific method‘) . Reputations are made when you prise a new hole in our understanding how our universe works.

Decades down the line, our societies also benefit (often along with a few new problems) from finding and understanding the way that the universe works. For instance, my work as a computer software engineer is, these days, is almost entirely dependent on the understanding of quantum tunnelling. First identified experimentally in 1927 as an unidentified issue and steadily refined as a theory ever since. In future decades this long process is likely to be the key to future transistors like the TFET (tunnel field effect transistor), as this IEEE article explains.

The standard model in physics has now been formalised since the mid-1970s. It has been proving remarkably hard to unthrone in the physics world because it keeps getting experimental results that confirm it. Apart from the irritation mentioned in the editorial above on know that it doesn’t explain some observed phenomenon, it also means that there has been now real lever to allow prise open a better understanding of how things really work.

Down the line of human history it means that it gets harder to build new technologies that allow us to work more subtly with our universe. Rather than using crude and coarse technologies with really annoying side-effects. C02 emissions from burning fossil carbon being the obvious example.

First results from the Muon g-2 experiment at Fermilab have strengthened evidence of new physics. The centerpiece of the experiment is a 50-foot-diameter superconducting magnetic storage ring, which sits in its detector hall amidst electronics racks, the muon beamline, and other equipment. This impressive experiment operates at negative 450 degrees Fahrenheit and studies the precession (or wobble) of muons as they travel through the magnetic field. Photo: Reidar Hahn, Fermilab

10 comments on “A new lever on the standard model? ”

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  1. Incognito 1
    12 April 2021 at 9:32 am

    Oh boy, I was so relieved to find that the headline of this OP was ‘misleading’ wink

    Mighty interesting stuff!

  2. RedLogix 2
    12 April 2021 at 9:54 am

    For instance, my work as a computer software engineer is, these days, is almost entirely dependent on the understanding of quantum tunnelling.

    It goes much deeper than this, virtually everything about the modern world levers this once obscure effect that few knew anything about.

    This image from that era captured a large fraction of possibly the greatest intellectual community in all of human history. It's almost haunting just how much this tiny group of people changed everything.

    • Tiger Mountain 2.1
      12 April 2021 at 11:24 am

      That is the Physics heavy squad alright. Have followed particle physics and astronomy in a populist and general sense since a kid. I cheered like a rugby fan when the Higgs particle was announced at CERN.

      As a maths phobic, never seriously got into it, but a school friend of mine did who taught in Australia and Latin America.

      Muons and Neutrinos may not go down well in the back blocks of places like the USA apparently though, where various polls record 4 in 10 Americans believe in a God enabled creation of the Earth less than 10,000 years ago!

    • ghostwhowalksnz 2.2
      12 April 2021 at 12:25 pm

      Interesting that there was no Rutherford at the Solvay conference on Electrons and Photons

      But even by 1927 the science was in two paradigms and essentially Einstein was 'out of date'

      'the originators of the newly introduced quantum mechanics -paradigm, including Werner Heisenberg himself, in addition to his collaborators Wolfgang Pauli, Max Born, Hendrik Kramers, Louis de Broglie, Niels Bohr and Paul Dirac.

      On the other side, also present, were supporters of the [superseded] classical, deterministic paradigm, represented most prominently by Albert Einstein himself, but also Max Planck, Paul Ehrenfest and Erwin Schrödinger.

  3. peter sim 3
    12 April 2021 at 9:36 pm

    Will these people ever make their minds up? Please I am still trying to understand my world.

    If Einstein was wrong what ever happened to e=mc2?

    Mechanics I comprehend.

    Quantum? Leaping electrons! I must be in a comic strip.

    • ghostwhowalksnz 3.1
      13 April 2021 at 6:28 am

      The Age of Physics is almost over and the 'big ' discoveries 'are done' – look how its been 30-40 years or more over the small details of quantum physics wheres in the 1920s they had already changed everything in a decade or so.

      The best part is the Age of biology is just getting started, part of which has been very useful in the vaccine race.

  4. Jackel 4
    12 April 2021 at 10:16 pm

    "What is laid down, ordered, factual, is never enough to embrace the whole truth: life always spills over the rim of every cup." – Boris Pasternak

  5. Tricledrown 5
    13 April 2021 at 10:18 am

    PeterSim science keeps moving forward with new technology we can test theories Einstein's theory is just a theory.

    But space exploration super computers more well educated physics graduates test and develop new theories with new evidence.

  6. Jenny How to get there 6
    13 April 2021 at 8:48 pm

    Albert Einstein formulated the theory of relativity which at the time was termed 'Pure Science' Science for the pure joy of discovery. Or put another way 'Science for the sake of science', with no practical applications.

    Einstein's new understanding of physics has enabled a technology worth $billions

    Without accounting for the effects of relativity the GPS on your smart phone would be accurate to three Km, instead 3m.

    Not much help when you are trying to find your friend's street address on a dark night, or the nearest gas station when the light comes on your dashboard.

    Who knew?

    So bring on the discoveries.

    pure science

    [pure science]

    NOUN

    1. a science depending on deductions from demonstrated truths, such as mathematics or logic, or studied without regard to practical applications.