“The Standard Model as it stands cannot possibly be right because it cannot predict why the universe exists,” said Gerald Gabrielse, the Board of Trustees Professor of Physics at Northwestern University. The Standard Model describes the seventeen known fundamental particles and their interactions, and provides us with a detailed set of predictions for how each of them should behave and interact. The model is a mathematical picture of reality, and no laboratory experiments yet performed have contradicted it. “We should be very careful about making assumptions that we’re getting closer to solving the mystery, but I do have considerable hope that we’re getting closer at this level of precision,” Gabrielse added.
In their 2018 study, researchers at Northwestern, Harvard and Yale Universities examined the shape of an electron’s charge with unprecedented precision to confirm that it is perfectly spherical. A slightly squashed charge could have indicated unknown, hard-to-detect heavy particles in the electron’s presence, a discovery that could have upended the global physics community. “If an electron were the size of Earth, we could detect if the Earth’s center was off by a distance a million times smaller than a human hair,” Gabrielse explained. “That’s how sensitive our apparatus is.”
“A Darker, Deeper Cosmos” –Looking Beyond the Standard Model
The Electron is Still Round. At Least for Now
“If we had discovered that the shape wasn’t round, that would be the biggest headline in physics for the past several decades,” said Gerald Gabrielse, who led the research at Northwestern. “But our finding is still just as scientifically significant because it strengthens the Standard Model of particle physics and excludes alternative models.”
In this artist’s representation above, an electron orbits an atom’s nucleus, spinning about its axis as a cloud of other subatomic particles are constantly emitted and reabsorbed. Several hypotheses predict particles, as yet undetected, would cause the cloud to appear slightly pear-shaped. Advanced Cold Molecule Electron (ACME) researchers peered at the shape with unprecedented, extreme precision. To the limits of their experiment, they saw a perfectly round sphere, implying that certain types of new particles — if they exist at all — have properties different from those theorists expected. (Nicolle R. Fuller, National Science Foundation).
The Very Big Loophole
This lack of contradiction has been puzzling physicists for decades: “The Standard Model as it stands cannot possibly be right because it cannot predict why the universe exists,” said Gabrielse, the Board of Trustees Professor of Physics at Northwestern. “That’s a pretty big loophole.”
Gabrielse and his ACME colleagues have spent their careers trying to close this loophole by examining the Standard Model’s predictions and then trying to confirm them through table-top experiments in the lab. In addition to Gabrielse, the research was led by John Doyle, the Henry B. Silsbee Professor of Physics at Harvard, and David DeMille, professor of physics at Yale.
“Fixing” the Standard Model
Attempting to “fix” the Standard Model, many alternative models predict that an electron’s seemingly uniform sphere is actually asymmetrically squished. One such model, called the Supersymmetric Model, posits that unknown, heavy subatomic particles influence the electron to alter its perfectly spherical shape—an unproven phenomenon called the “electric dipole moment.”
These undiscovered, heavier particles could be responsible for some of the universe’s most glaring mysteries and could possibly explain why the universe is made from matter instead of antimatter.
“Almost all of the alternative models say the electron charge may well be squished, but we just haven’t looked sensitively enough,” said Gabrielse, the founding director of Northwestern’s Center for Fundamental Physics. “That’s why we decided to look there with a higher precision than ever realized before.”
Squashing Alternative Theories
Squashing the alternative theories: the ACME team probed this question by firing a beam of cold thorium-oxide molecules into a chamber the size of a large desk. Researchers then studied the light emitted from the molecules. Twisting light would indicate an electric dipole moment. When the light did not twist, the research team concluded that the electron’s shape was, in fact, round, confirming the Standard Model’s prediction. No evidence of an electric dipole moment means no evidence of those hypothetical heavier particles. If these particles do exist at all, their properties differ from those predicted by theorists.
Seriously Rethinking Alternatives
“Our result tells the scientific community that we need to seriously rethink some of the alternative theories,” DeMille said.
In 2014, the ACME team performed the same measurement with a simpler apparatus. By using improved laser methods and different laser frequencies, the current experiment was an order of magnitude more sensitive than its predecessor.
Gabrielse, DeMille, Doyle and their teams plan to keep tuning their instruments to make more and more precise measurements. Until researchers find evidence to the contrary, the electron’s round shape—and the universe’s mysteries—will remain.
New discrepancy Discovered –The W Boson
Physicists at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Illinois, have found that an elementary particle called the W boson appears to be 0.1% too heavy — a tiny discrepancy that could foreshadow a huge shift in fundamental physics, reports Charlie Wood for Quanta.
The measurement, reported in the journal Science, “comes from a vintage particle collider at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, that smashed its final protons a decade ago. The roughly 400 members of the Collider Detector at Fermilab (CDF) collaboration have continued to analyze W bosons produced by the collider, called the Tevatron, chasing down myriad sources of error to reach an unparalleled level of precision.
The measurement, reported in the journal Science, “comes from a vintage particle collider at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, that smashed its final protons a decade ago. The roughly 400 members of the Collider Detector at Fermilab (CDF) collaboration have continued to analyze W bosons produced by the collider, called the Tevatron, chasing down myriad sources of error to reach an unparalleled level of precision.”
“If the W’s excess heft relative to the standard theoretical prediction can be independently confirmed,” writes Wood, “the finding would imply the existence of undiscovered particles or forces and would bring about the first major rewriting of the laws of quantum physics in half a century.”
The Last Word’ –A Word of Caution
When asked what an oversized W Boson might imply, physicist Sven Heinemeyer replied in an email to The Daily Galaxy: “This discrepancy – if confirmed – would likely imply relatively light new particles (i.e. particles not contained in the Standard Model). This would in general strengthen the possibilities that the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) can discover some of those new particles.
“One word of caution: the new measurement by CDF (Cumulative Distribution Functions) is not only 0.1% above the prediction of the Standard Model. It is also ~0.07% above the (so far) experimental value (the world average of all so far existing measurements), which requires a thorough investigation on all sides.”
Heinemeyer’s research interests include the theoretical development of the minimal supersymmetric standard model.
Maxwell Moe, astrophysicist, NASA Einstein Fellow, University of Arizona via Sven Heinemeyer, Northwestern University, Quanta and ACME Collaboration
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Maxwell Moe, astrophysicist, NASA Einstein Fellow, University of Arizona. Max can be found two nights a week probing the mysteries of the Universe at the Kitt Peak National Observatory. Max received his Ph.D in astronomy from Harvard University in 2015.