Oh. Physicists!
Don't believe that the Nature may have fifth force. If this achievement would confirmed, you should consider it only as a result of complex of two or three of four known forces, which physicist was looking for it, for long time.
Ahmad Shammazadeh
In Brief
Scientists have long known the four forces: Gravity, electromagnetism, and the weak and strong forces between atoms. But could there be a fifth force still waiting to be discovered? New evidence suggests there is.
Physics can be pretty intense at times, but one of the most straightforward aspects is that everything in the Universe is controlled by just four fundamental forces: gravity, electromagnetic, and strong and weak nuclear forces.
But now physicists in Hungary think they might have found
evidence of a mysterious fifth force of nature. And, if verified, it
would mean we’d need to rethink our understanding of how the Universe
actually works.
Before we get into that, let’s go back to those four forces for a
second, because they’re pretty important. They’re a fundamental part of
the standard model of physics, which explain all the behaviour and particles we see in the Universe.
Meet The Forces
Starting from the larger end of the scale, gravity is responsible for
holding together the planets and gravity, and electromagnetic force is
in charge of keeping our molecules together.
“At the smallest level are the two other forces: the strong nuclear
force is the glue for atomic nuclei, and the weak nuclear force helps
some atoms go through radioactive decay,” writes Ryan F. Mandelbaum for Popular Science. “These forces seemed to explain the physics we can observe, more or less.”
Evidence of this fifth force was spotted last year, when a team from the Hungarian Academy of Science reported
that they’d fired protons at lithium-7, and in the fall out, had
detected a brand new super-light boson that was only 34 times heavier
than an electron.
As exciting as that sounds, the paper was mostly overlooked, until a
team in the US published their own analysis of the data at the end of
last month, on pre-print site arXiv.
The US team, led by Jonathan Feng from the University of California,
Irvine, showed that the data didn’t conflict with previous experiments,
and calculated that the new boson could indeed be carrying a fifth
fundamental force – which is when the science world started to get
interested.
That paper hasn’t been peer-reviewed as yet, so we can’t get too
excited, but it was uploaded so that the other physicists could
scrutinise the results and add their own findings, which is what’s
happening now.
As Nature magazine reports, researchers
around the world are racing to conduct follow-up tests to verify the
Hungarian discovery, and we can expect results within around a year.
But if you’re anything like me, you’re probably wondering, what does a super-light boson have to do with a new force of nature?
The Latest Work
This isn’t the first time researchers have claimed to detect a fifth force (there’s even a Wikipedia page
for fifth force possibilities), but the search has really heated up
over the past decade. Many scientists think there might be a particle
out there called a ‘dark photon’, which could carry a new force that
would explain dark matter – that invisible substance that makes up more than 80 (It's wrong. Dark matter shapes only 23% of the Universe's mass.- Shammazadeh) percent of the Universe’s mass.
That’s what the Hungarian team, led by physicist
Attila Krasznahorkay, were looking for. To do that, they fired protons
at thin targets of lithium-7, a collision that created unstable
beryllium-8 nuclei, which then decayed into pairs of electrons and
positrons.
“According to the standard model, physicists should see that the
number of observed pairs drops as the angle separating the trajectory of
the electron and positron increases,” Edwin Cartlidge writes for Nature.
“Perhaps we are seeing our first glimpse into physics beyond the visible Universe.”But that wasn’t what the team saw – at about 140 degrees, the number of these pairs jumped, creating a little bump before dropping off again at higher angles.
This ‘bump’ was evidence of a new particle, according to
Krasznahorkay and his team. They calculated that the mass of this new
particle would be around 17 mega electron volts, which isn’t what was
expected for the ‘dark photon’, but could be evidence of something else
entirely.
“We are very confident about our experimental results,” Krasznahorkay told Nature. He says that
the chance of this bump being an anomaly is around 1 in 200 billion
(but let’s keep in mind that no other team has confirmed this as yet.)
The analysis by Feng’s team in the US didn’t involve a repeat of the
experiment, but simply used calculations to verify that, theoretically
at least, the proposed super-light boson, Krasznahorkay detected could be capable of carrying a new fundamental force.
Like all good scientists, the physics community is pretty skeptical
about the claims so far, especially seeing as the super-light boson
wasn’t what anyone expected to find.
“It certainly isn’t the first thing I would have written down if I were allowed to augment the standard model at will,” Jesse Thaler from MIT, who wasn’t involved in either study, told Nature. But he admitted that he’s paying attention to what happens next. “Perhaps we are seeing our first glimpse into physics beyond the visible Universe,” he added.
If the international research community sticks to its word and gives us some more data to analyze in the next year, hopefully we won’t have to wait too long to find out.
Source: Futurism- News
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