The experiments in two of the particle accelerators at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) had produced values that were in line with the theory. These results may be the first glimpses of the “new physics”: unknown particles that help to explain these great mysteries of the universe. The rest of the cosmos is dark matter (27%) and dark energy (68%), which are completely unknown. The problem is that this kind of matter only makes up 5% of the universe. Until now the standard model had perfectly described the behavior of conventional matter. “This new measure of the mass of the W is the most precise and complete that has been done until now,” explains Alberto Ruiz, a researcher at the Cantabria Physics Institute and one of the authors of the study, which has been published in Science magazine. In the jargon of physicists, this is known as seven sigma: a discovery in particle physics is accepted with a level of error of one in a million. There are only three possibilities in a trillion that this result could be chance. The most plausible interpretation is that supersymmetry really exists, which implies that there are known particles that have unknown supersymmetric sisters Sven Heinemeyer, researcher from the Institute of Theoretical Physics in Madrid The difference is outside the theoretical framework. After analyzing more than four million boson W particles, the researchers found that its mass is 80,433 megaelectronvolts, while the standard model predicted 80,357, with a margin of error included in both of them. The particles travel close to the speed of light and when they collide, they disintegrate into other elementary particles. This subatomic particle has the same mass as a proton but with a negative charge. The results published today show that at least one of these 17 parts does not obey the rules.īetween 20, the Tevatron was firing protons into their antiparticle, the antiproton.
For decades now, human beings have been building ever-more-powerful particle accelerators to smash up atoms into their different elemental particles and to test whether they follow the rules of the game. According to this model, quarks and leptons constitute the matter and the bosons transmit the known forces, such as electromagnetism. In the 1970s, the standard model was defined, setting out the properties of these 17 pieces of the puzzle that form the atoms of all of the known elements. Uranium, one of the most complex elements, has more than 700 quarks of different types and 92 leptons.
Three quarks together form a proton, and if we add a lepton we obtain the simplest element in the universe, hydrogen. Everything that humans can see and touch is made up of different combinations of 17 elemental particles, which fall into three major categories: quarks, leptons and bosons. To understand the importance of this discovery, we have to travel to the quantum level of matter: penetrating the microscopic atoms that make up every one of the letters of this text and reaching their most-basic components, the elementary particles. ‘Higgs Boson Blues’: between science and pop culture
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