![]() "Any alternative must account for a wealth of experimental observations that have been made over very many years," he says. particle physics laboratory, explained via email that scientists might just need to tinker with it a bit. John Campbell, a theoretical physicist at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, the top U.S. So does that all mean that it's time to throw out the Standard Model and start over? Not hardly. "This particle is consistent with the Higgs boson but it will take further work to determine whether or not it is the Higgs boson predicted by the Standard Model," CERN's website explains. In 2012, researchers using the Large Hadron Collider announced that they'd discovered a particle that seems to be the right one, but the case isn't quite closed yet. And finally, there's also the murkiness that remains around the Higgs boson, a particle that's an essential component of the Standard Model. There's the question of how newly-discovered particles might fit into the theory. It also doesn't explain phenomena such as the nature of dark matter, the mysterious mass that along with dark energy, makes up 96 percent of the universe. As CERN notes, the theory only accounts for three of the four fundamental forces, by omitting the influence of gravity. "Over time and through many experiments, the Standard Model has become established as a well-tested physics theory." (If you want more details, check out CERN's primer on the Standard Model.)īut while the Standard Model has been really useful to physicists, they've been aware for a while that it doesn't explain everything about the subatomic realm. The Standard Model "has successfully explained almost all experimental results and precisely predicted a wide variety of phenomena," says the website of CERN, the European physics research organization which operates the Large Hadron Collider. The theoretical framework describes how the basic building blocks of matter - the fundamental particles -are governed by forces such as electromagnetism. While most ordinary people probably have never heard of it, the Standard Model explains the reality around us at the tiniest, most basic level. "This is what we call an observation," he clarifies in an email.Įven so, the discrepancy adds at least some momentum to the notion that the long-established Standard Model might need at least a little revision. A new method of analyzing the data, proposed by Polish physicist Marcin Chrząszcz, indicates that the beauty meson's angle of decay is different from what the Standard Model would indicate.Ĭhrząszcz emphasizes that in the world of physics, the new finding doesn't qualify as a "discovery," because the deviation isn't sufficiently large. The institute's press release, for example, calls attention to 20 data from the Large Hadron Collider, the facility along the French-Swiss border that is the world's largest and most powerful particle accelerator. What researchers have discovered in recent years, though, is that beauty mesons don't seem to quite match up with predictions based on the Standard Model. John Campbell, Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory theoretical physicist
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