After a decade of analysis, a collaboration of physicists has achieved the most precise measurement of the mass of a key particle. Radically different from predictions based on the Standard Model, this one could shake up physics as we know it.
Record-breaking measurement accuracy
Although incomplete, since its development in the 1970s, the standard model has been able to explain very effectively the interactions between particles and most of the fundamental forces, consistently resisting experiments testing its predictions. To do this, scientists compare the predicted mass of the particles to the actual measurements made in the particle collidersand it so happens that this process has recently led to the highlighting of a major divergence.
Elementary particles, the W bosons convey the electroweak force and mediate nuclear processes, such as those occurring in the bowels of the Sun. According to the standard model, their mass is related to that of the bosons of Higgs and a subatomic particle called top quark.
In the context of work published in the journal Sciencenearly 400 collaborating scientists Collider Detector at Fermilab (CDF) spent a decade examining 4.2 million candidate W bosons collected from 26 years of collider data Tevatronallowing them to calculate the mass of a W boson to within 0.01%, which is a record.
This was set at 80,433.5 mega-electronvolts (MeV), with an uncertainty of only 9.4 MeV, which is within the range of some earlier measurements, but well outside that predicted by the standard model, placing it at 80,357 MeV, to within 6 MeV (meaning that the mass of the W boson was 7 standard deviations higher than the predictions).
Major potential implications
Although many researchers suspect an error or an overly aggressive error evaluation process, the study authors say that the approaches used to achieve this result, involving an unprecedented number of edit enhancements, were carefully crafted. and tested for years.
According to them, the figure obtained could hint at unknown particles or new physics beyond the Standard Model, which interfere with the expected interactions.
” Now it’s up to the theoretical physics community and other experiments to shed some light on this mystery. “, valued David Tobackof the CDF. ” If the difference between the experimental value and the expected value is due to some sort of new particle or subatomic interaction, which is one of the possibilities, there’s a good chance it’s something that can be discovered in future experiences. »
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