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December 20, 2019 10:03 pm
Original Link: http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/p4zrpVjaDwU/new-boson-appears-in-nuclear-decay-breaks-standard-model
New Boson Appears In Nuclear Decay, Breaks Standard Model
An anonymous reader shares an excerpt from an Ars Technica article: In November, people started polishing a Nobel prize for a group of physicists who seemed to have found new boson. [...] This result has been cooking for quite some time. The first experimental results date back to 2015, with publication in 2016. Essentially, the scientists took some lithium and shot protons at it. By choosing the energy of the protons correctly, Beryllium in a particular excited state is produced, which quickly decays back to lithium by emitting an electron and a positron. Now, in these experiments, energy and momentum must be conserved. The lithium nucleus is quite a complicated beast and can rattle around in all sorts of ways, meaning that the electron and positron have a certain amount of freedom in the direction in which they are emitted. By contrast, the researchers observed that some electrons and positrons seem to be correlated in their emission direction. Computer modeling confirmed that this was not due to their equipment and could not be explained by the nuclear physics of beryllium, lithium, or any known background process. The correlation could, however, be explained by a new boson that decayed by emitting a positron and an electron. As long as the production was reasonably inefficient, and the mass was about 17MeV (million electron volts), then the data was beautifully explained. It is always possible to extend our models of the Universe to include new particles, including new bosons and new forces. But, it isn't good enough to match a single experimental result. You have to match all of them. The end results are particles that look a bit like a backyard panel-beating job. Yeah, the paint matches, but you can still see the wavy patches where the filler hasn't been sanded flat. The problems arise from the mass -- 17MeV is at the low end of well-explored territory. So, why did this story flare back up again? A new paper, by the same scientists that published the beryllium results. This time, they measured electron-positron emissions from excited helium. Same experiment, different atom, but the same 17MeV boson was found. The new result is pretty strong evidence. "If the experiment has some kind of systematic error in it, then we would expect that the 'new' particle would change mass between helium and beryllium," adds Ars Technica. "It doesn't, though; the results are very consistent between experiments. That means that if it is an error, it is an unfortunately flukey one."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Original Link: http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/p4zrpVjaDwU/new-boson-appears-in-nuclear-decay-breaks-standard-model
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