Rebooting the Large Hadron Collider and searching for a fifth force of nature | Large Hadron Collider

The Large Hadron Collider The (LHC) will resume on Friday after a three-year hiatus, and is expected to solve a scientific issue about whether there is a mysterious anomaly that could indicate the existence of a fifth fundamental force of nature.

puzzling results I mentioned last year He reignited hopes that the 20-mile-long collider could make a second massive discovery, more than a decade later. Higgs boson.

“We are going into this race with more optimism about the possibility of a revolution coming,” said Dr. Metish Patel, a particle physicist at Imperial College London whose team was responsible for the research last year.

So far, everything that has been discovered in the LHC – including the Higgs – is in line with the so-called Standard Form. This has been the guiding theory of particle physics since the 1970s, but is known to be incomplete because it fails to explain some of physics’ deepest mysteries, such as the nature of dark matter.

But, Data collected in the LHCb . experimentone of four massive particle detectors at Cern in Switzerland, that appears to show particles behaving in a way that cannot be explained by the Standard Model.

The experiment looked at the decay of particles called beauty quarks, which are expected to decay at an equal rate into electrons and their heavier cousins, muons. However, beauty quarks appear to turn out to be 15% fewer muons, indicating that an unknown factor – potentially a new force – was tipping the scales. Two of the top candidates include hypothetical force-carrying particles called leptoquarks, or Z primes.

“The stakes are very high,” Patel said. “If we confirm that, it will be a revolution of the kind we have never seen – certainly in my life. You don’t want to screw it up.”

Before shutting down the LHC for an upgrade in 2018, the team collected enough data to indicate that the odds were roughly a thousand to an outcome that occurs by chance. But the gold standard for particle physics is a much stricter one at a confidence level of 3.5 metres, which means more data is needed before the discovery is announced. There is also a long-standing possibility that some unknown experimental flaw could explain the results.

“When you show this result to particle physicists, their first instinct is, ‘You guys screwed up’ rather than a new force of nature,” Patel said. “We physicists like to be above certainty and get out the other side.”

In the past year, the expectation has increased by more intriguing hints of physics beyond the Standard Model seen in other experiments, including recent ones. Unexplained Results of Fermilab in the United States.

“There appears to be a set of loose filaments now,” said Professor John Butterworth of University College London, who is working on the Atlas experiment of the Large Hadron Collider. “It made me start thinking there might be something within reach from this race or the next round.”

If the LHC fails to detect a new science beyond the Standard Model, Butterworth said, that wouldn’t represent a failure but would leave the field “a bit in a quandary” about where we should look next.

The third round is expected to run until 2026, after an upgrade that included the installation of additional powerful magnets designed to compress protons inside the collider into finer, denser beams. This will increase the rate of particle collisions inside the accelerator, which means that scientists will be able to monitor rare events with greater accuracy.

“The potential for discovering new ideas is still very large,” said Ashutosh Kotwal, an experimental particle physicist at Duke University in the US and co-chair of a research group on the Atlas experiment of the Large Hadron Collider. “It should be noted that the data we have collected so far is only one-tenth of the total. That we plan. It’s too early to lose heart.”