Key particle weighs in a bit heavy, confounding physicists

The grand explanation physicists use to describe how the universe works may have some major new flaws after a fundamental particle was found to have more mass than scientists thought.

Dave Toback is a particle physicist at Texas A&M University and a spokesman for the U.S. government. It means something fundamental in our understanding of nature is wrong if it is replicated by other labs.

The physicists at the lab measured the mass of 4 million W bosons after they crashed particles together. The particles that make up the fundamental force at the center of atoms exist for a fraction of a second before they decay into other particles.

They are constantly popping in and out of existence in the quantum froth of the universe.

A team of 400 scientists from around the world published a study in the journal Science that said the difference in mass is too large to be explained away.

Scientists say the result must be confirmed by another experiment. It would be one of the biggest problems yet with the detailed rulebook for the cosmos, called the standard model.

The leader of the analysis project at Duke University said it was like finding a hidden room in your house.

There is a possibility that there is a undiscovered particle interacting with the W boson. Maybe dark matter is playing a role. Researchers said that they don't understand new physics at the moment.

The standard model says a W boson should measure 80,357,000 electron volts, plus or minus six.

We found more than that. Giorgio Chiarelli, another scientist for the Fermi team and research director for the Italian National Institute for Nuclear Physics, said that it was not enough. The W boson was put at a heftier 80,433,000 electron volts, plus or minus nine.

It doesn't seem like a big difference, but it is.

The team and experts not involved in the research said that the big claim requires more proof from a second team.

It is an incredibly delicate measurement, it requires understanding of various calibrations of various little effects, according to a particle physicist at the University of California Santa Barbara. I take them very seriously. At the end of the day, we need a confirmation by another experiment.

Caltech physicist Sean M. Carroll, who wasn't part of the research, said it might be because the W boson was found to be lighter than predicted.

The standard model of physics could be affected by the finding.

The model is how we understand the facts.

The standard model is not perfect. It does not explain dark matter or gravity. Researchers said that if scientists have to tinker with it to explain it, they have to make sure it doesn't throw out the mathematical equations that explain and predict other particles and forces well.

The model has a recurring problem. A year ago, a different team found a problem with the standard model.

Toback said that quantum mechanics is beautiful and weird.

More information: A. V. Kotwal, High precision measurement of the W-boson mass with the CDF II detector, Science (2022). DOI: 10.1126/science.abk1781. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abk1781 Journal information: Science

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