You would expect beauty quarks to decay into muons just as often as they do to electrons. This is strange because the muon is in essence a carbon-copy of the electron, identical in every way except that it’s around 200 times heavier. Specifically, beauty quarks appeared to be decaying into leptons called “muons” less often than they decayed into electrons. The new result relates to an experimental anomaly that was first hinted at in 2014, when LHCb physicists spotted “beauty” quarks decaying in unexpected ways. There are many different kinds of quarks, some of which are unstable and can decay into other particles. The standard model describes nature on the smallest of scales, comprising fundamental particles known as leptons (such as electrons) and quarks (which can come together to form heavier particles such as protons and neutrons) and the forces they interact with. The standard model has withstood every experimental test thrown at it since it was assembled in the 1970s, so to claim that we’re finally seeing something it can’t explain requires extraordinary evidence. After analysing trillions of collisions produced over the last decade, we may be seeing evidence of something altogether new - potentially the carrier of a brand new force of nature.īut the excitement is tempered by extreme caution. So our new paper from LHCb, one of the four giant LHC experiments, is likely to set physicists’ hearts beating just a little faster. Dark matter, microscopic black holes and hidden dimensions were just some of the possibilities.īut aside from the spectacular discovery of the Higgs boson, the project has failed to yield any clues as to what might lie beyond the standard model of particle physics, our current best theory of the micro-cosmos. and are also going on at the LHC.When Cern’s gargantuan accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), fired up ten years ago, hopes abounded that new particles would soon be discovered that could help us unravel physics’ deepest mysteries. ‘Searches for supersymmetry go back to previous experiments. ‘Searches for extra dimensions and black holes at the LHC have been going on since the 2000s,’ Christopher White, a theoretical physicist at Queen Mary University London told WIRED. By colliding particles at high enough energies, the LHC might be able to detect a glimpse of these particles.Īnother way is by catching the flash of a microscopic black hole, which some theorists suggest could be the doors to alternate universes. Theories like string theory predict the existence of certain particles that could only exist if there were more than four dimensions. If there are more dimensions, some argue, this might explain some mysteries of modern physics such as why gravity is so weak compared to the rest of the fundamental forces. Some theories of quantum physics point towards there being more than just the three dimensions in space we deal with in our everyday lives – but this is not predicted in the Standard Model.įor example, string theory, which says the fundamental building blocks of life are made up of vibrating strings, predicts there to be nine dimensions in space and one in time. One of the strangest questions scientists are using the LHC to answer is how many dimensions there actually are.
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