Telegraph 23 March 2021 - decimalised

 Key to how universe works may have been discovered

decimalised and edited including links and notes

The particle breakthrough at the Large Hadron Collider may help explain some of the deepest puzzles in modern physics

BySarah Knapton, SCIENCE EDITOR23 March 2021 

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1. The key to understanding how the universe works may have been discovered by scientists at the Large Hadron Collider, in a breakthrough hailed as the most exciting in 20 years.
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3. Particle physicists have seen signs that a mystery particle or force [another] is  interacting with other particles in a manner never witnessed before.
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5. It may explain some of the deepest puzzles in modern physics, such as what dark matter is made from, or why there is an imbalance of matter and antimatter in the universe.   [some of the deepest puzzles in modern physics more]
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7. Currently, scientists understand the universe using The Standard Model, a theory which describes all the known fundamental particles and the forces that they interact with. more
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9. It sets out the workings of the building blocks of nature: quarks, leptons, force-carrier particles, and the Higgs boson. more
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11. But the Standard Model breaks down when it comes to explaining crucial issues such as gravity or why the expansion of the universe is accelerating. 
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13. It also cannot account for dark matter, an invisible substance which makes up 27 per cent of the mass of the universe more and is thought to hold galaxies together. 

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                    The discovery of a new force in nature is the holy grail of particle physics CREDIT: PA

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1. To find out what is going on, scientists at the Large Hadron Collider created particles known as Beauty Quarks which existed soon after the Big Bang but which decay quickly into electrons and muons, and now no longer exist in nature. 
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3. But they discovered they are not behaving in the way they expected. Under the Standard Model, Beauty quarks should decay into particles called K+mesons which have either two muons or two electrons. 
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5. Scientists found that for every 100 mesons with electrons, there were just 85 with muons, something that cannot happen under the Standard Model. 
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7. It suggests never-before-seen particles or forces are tipping the scales away from muons. 

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LHCb here

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4   Four crucial questions the discovery could help answer

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What is dark matter? Galaxies spin far faster than they should based on the gravitational pull of visible matter. Scientists realised there must be something giving them additional mass which increases their gravitational pull. This has been dubbed dark matter and scientists have theorised it could be created in the Large Hadron Collider.

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What is dark energy? Like dark matter, dark energy can only be theorised from its effects on the universe. One major puzzle is why the expansion of the universe is speeding up, when it should be slowing over time as it loses energy. Although it might be a property of spacetime, some scientists believe it is a new type of force which could be detected.

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Is there a gravity particle?   Einstein’s theory of general relativity suggested that gravity is a property of spacetime, caused when massive bodies like stars and planets bend time and space itself. But some scientists believe there is a particle – a graviton  more – which bestows gravity. Einstein’s theory does not fit into the Standard Model. more

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Why is there so much matter in the universe? more The Big Bang should have created equal amounts of matter and antimatter, but today, everything we see is made almost entirely of matter. Matter and antimatter particles are always produced as a pair and, if they come in contact, annihilate one another, leaving behind pure energy, so something must have prevented this reaction. 

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1. Dr Mitesh Patel, from the Department of Physics at Imperial College, and one of the leading physicists behind the measurement, said: “We were actually shaking when we first looked at the results, we were that excited. Our hearts did beat a bit faster.
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3. “It’s too early to say if this genuinely is a deviation from the Standard Model but the potential implications are such that these results are the most exciting thing I’ve done in 20 years in the field. It has been a long journey to get here.”
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5. The LHC is the world’s largest and most powerful particle collider – it accelerates subatomic particles to almost the speed of light, before smashing them into each other. 
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7. These collisions produce a burst of new particles, which physicists then record and study in order to better understand the foundations of nature.
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9. In the Standard Model, electrons and their heavier cousins, muons, are treated identically, so beauty quarks should decay into muons just as often as they do to electrons. The new result suggests that this is not happening.

A graphic by Imperial College London showing a very rare decay of a beauty meson involving an electron and positron CREDIT: CERN / LHCb / PA

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1. Dr Paula Alvarez Cartelle, of the University of Cambridge, one of the team leaders, said: “This new result offers tantalising hints of the presence of a new fundamental particle or force that interacts differently with these different types of particles.
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3. “The more data we have, the stronger this result has become. This measurement is the most significant in a series of results from the past decade that all seem to line up – and could all point towards a common explanation.
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5. “The results have not changed, but their uncertainties have shrunk, increasing our ability to see possible differences with the Standard Model.”
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7. Scientists say the latest result offers for the first evidence that there could be something wrong with our current understanding of particle physics.  more
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9. But there are still concerns it may be a fluke, and Bristol University particle physics group is currently trying to confirm the results. 

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A selection from "Comments".

Janina Hall

24 Mar 2021 8:44AM

@George Breakfast I ... prefer the terms bottom and top for the heaviest quarks, 

not the alternatives 'beauty' and 'truth', which are hardly ever used – except now apparently.

By the way, mesons consist of pairs of quarks, not leptons (ie electrons or muons) although their decay involves leptons. The article needs a little more work, but I acknowledge that the significance of such a discovery is challenging to explain from scratch.

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Neil Kn24 Mar 2021 8:10AM

90% of the universe is dark energy / matter

Dark energy / matter is made up to balance equations and has never been seen.

It's total nonsense.

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Nigel Saunders24 Mar 2021 5:11AM

The nucleus is labelled as an electron in the diagram, overturning the nuclear model from a hundred years ago. Now that really is a discovery!

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Jeff Allan23 Mar 2021 8:16PM

Looks like the universe is fractal in nature, in that the deeper we look , more we find, whether at the macro level, or galactic level.

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Geoffrey Thorpe23 Mar 2021 7:21PM

Perhaps there isn’t an imbalance between matter and anti-matter, but anti-matter exists in some spatial dimension that we are unable to perceive. Or perhaps dark matter exists in that other dimension.  Perhaps quantum entanglement of particles separated by considerable distance in three dimensional space occurs because the particles remain unseparated in some fourth spatial dimension. The seemingly ‘spooky’ quantum entanglement giving us a perceptual glimpse into the existence of the other dimension.

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Thomas Kavanagh23 Mar 2021 7:38PM

@Geoffrey Thorpe

Interesting comment Geoffrey but let us not forget the very small parameters of our knowledge, there is nothing to prove or meritoriously theorise a concept of a matrix of other dimensions whose entanglements and  interactions are way way beyond our theoretical comprehension.

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