Can one all-powerful SUPERFORCE control the universe?

Is There One All-Powerful SUPER FORCE Controlling The Universe?

A new force of nature has been discovered: muons

From attaching a magnet to a refrigerator door to throwing a ball into a basketball hoop, the forces of physics are at play in every moment of our lives.

All the forces we experience every day can be reduced to just four categories: Gravity, electromagnetism, strong force and weak force.

Now physicists claim to have found possible evidence for a fifth fundamental force of nature.

The findings come from research conducted in a laboratory near Chicago.

The four fundamental forces determine how all objects and particles in the universe interact with each other.

Gravity, for example, causes objects to fall to the ground, and heavy objects behave as if they are stuck to the ground.

The U.K.'s Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) said the result was "strong evidence for the existence of an undiscovered subatomic particle or new force."

But the results of the Muon g-2 experiment are not yet sufficient for a definitive discovery.

The chance that the result is a statistical coincidence is currently one in 40,000, which corresponds to a statistical confidence level of 4.1 sigma.

To be considered a discovery, the probability that the observation is a coincidence must be 5 sigma, or 1 in 3.5 million.

Prof. Mark Lancaster, who is leading the experiment in the United Kingdom, told BBC News, "We found that the interaction of muons is not consistent with the Standard Model [the current widely accepted theory explaining the behavior of the building blocks of the universe]."

The University of Manchester researcher added, "This is of course very exciting because it potentially points to a future with new laws of physics, new particles and a new force that we haven't seen before."

The discovery is the latest in a series of promising results from particle physics experiments in the U.S., Japan and most recently from the Large Hadron Collider on the Swiss-French border.

Prof. Ben Allanach of the University of Cambridge, who was not involved in the recent effort, said, "My spidey sense is tingling, telling me this is going to be real.

The experiment, based at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) in Batavia, Illinois, looks for signs of new phenomena in physics by studying the behavior of subatomic particles called muons.


Some of these subatomic particles are composed of even smaller constituents, while others cannot be decomposed into other particles (fundamental particles).

In the Muon g-2 experiment, particles are sent around a 14-meter ring and then a magnetic field is applied.

According to the current laws of physics, which are embodied in the Standard Model, this should cause the muons to wobble at a certain speed.

Instead, the scientists found that the muons wobbled faster than expected.

No one yet knows what this potential new force does, except that it affects the muon particles.

Theoretical physicists believe it may also be related to an as-yet-undiscovered subatomic particle.

Last month, physicists working on the LHCb experiment at the Large Hadron Collider described results that could point to a new particle and a new force.

Dr. Mitesh Patel of Imperial College London, who was involved in the project, said, "The race is really on now to try to use one of these experiments to provide evidence that this really is something new.

Prof. Allanach has given the possible fifth force various names in his theoretical models.

A fifth fundamental force could help explain some of the great mysteries about the universe that have preoccupied scientists in recent decades.

WIKI TOPICS

• Physics beyond the Standard Model
• Theoretical physics
• Theories of gravitation

Weak interaction - Physics

The weak interaction, also called the weak force or weak nuclear force, a fundamental force of nature that underlies some forms of radioactivity, controls the decay of unstable subatomic particles such as mesons and triggers the nuclear fusion reaction that powers the sun.

The weak interaction acts on left-handed fermions - that is, elementary particles with half-integer values of intrinsic angular momentum or spin - and right-handed antifermions.

The particles interact via the weak interaction by exchanging force carrier particles known as W and Z particles.

These particles are heavy, with a mass about 100 times that of a proton, and it is their heaviness that defines the extremely short range of the weak interaction and makes the weak interaction appear at the low energies associated with radioactivity.

The effectiveness of the weak interaction is limited to a distance of 10-17 meters, which is about 1% of the diameter of a typical atomic nucleus.

Weak interactions in radioactive decays are 100,000 times weaker than electromagnetic interactions.

Neutrons tied in atomic nuclei can be stable, as they are in the known chemical elements, but they can also lead to the kind of radioactivity known as beta decay through weak decays.

In this case, the lifetime of the nuclei can vary from a thousandth of a second to millions of years.

Although neutrons bound in atomic nuclei can be stable, as they are in chemical elements, they may also lead to radioactive decay known as beta decay.

The Standard Model of particle physics summarizes the characteristics of weak interactions, including their relative strength and range, and the nature of the force-carrying particles.

Electroweak theory - Physics

In the 60s, Sheldon Lee Glashow, Abdus Salam, and Steven Weinberg independently discovered that they could construct a gauge-invariant theory of weak forces, provided they also included electromagnetic forces.

This theory required the presence of four massless "messenger" or carrier particles, two charged and two neutral, to mediate a single electroweak interaction.

This implies that the basic symmetry of the theory is hidden, or "broken," by some mechanism that gives mass to particles exchanging in weak interactions but not to photons exchanging in electromagnetic interactions.

In the early 1970s, Gerardus 't Hooft and Martinus Weltman laid the mathematical foundation for renormalizing the unified electrostatic theory proposed earlier by Glashow, Salam, and Weinberg.

The renormalization eliminated the physical inconsistencies inherent in earlier calculations of the properties of carrier particles, allowed accurate calculations of their masses, and led to a broader acceptance of the electrostatic theory.