6/3/2023 0 Comments Physic particles![]() ![]() There was so much interest in the findings,” Roberts says.īreakthroughs of this magnitude, much like the construction of the gigantic machines that make them possible, take time. “In 2001, when it looked like we were seeing evidence of new physics at Brookhaven, it was in newspapers all around the world. The Fermilab experimental results are especially exciting because they confirm similar findings that were made at Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) in 2001. ![]() In its first year of operation, in 2018, the Fermilab experiment collected more data than all prior muon g-factor experiments combined. Inside the donut at Fermilab, high-precision detectors allow physicists to measure the muon g-factor, which is what led them to discover that there must be a new type of particle or force swirling around the muons in the foam, changing their g-factor from what the Standard Model of physics would expect. The g-factor is influenced by the muon’s interactions with the sea of subatomic particles that naturally exist all around it-a constantly changing “foam” of short-lived particles. The strength of the muons’ magnetic field, which physicists call the “g-factor,” determines how much it wobbles. In this video, see how the gigantic donut-shaped machine traveled to Fermilab in 2013.Īs those muons spin around the donut-shaped racetrack, they wobble as if on an internal axis, like a top or gyroscope. The result? Millions of muons are produced every second. Inside the machine, protons are smashed into a metal target, mimicking the collision that happens when cosmic rays hit Earth’s atmosphere. Particles approaching the speed of lightĪt Fermilab, a huge donut-shaped machine-embedded with electronics and circuitry custom-built by Roberts and other BU physicists-uses strong magnetic fields to trap the muons in a magnetic racetrack as the particles travel around at incredibly high speeds, almost at the speed of light. “Because they have an electric charge and are spinning around, they generate a magnetic field-they act like tiny spinning magnets.” That spin is key to scientists’ being able to detect their behavior and what other particles and forces are influencing muons. “Muons are heavier siblings to the electron, and they have an electric charge,” says Roberts, a BU College of Arts & Sciences professor of physics. These particles are about 200 times heavier than electrons. They are naturally created when cosmic rays traveling from the sun, other planets, and the universe beyond our solar system reach and interact with Earth’s atmosphere. Muons are a good candidate for helping physicists study the subatomic world because they can be easily detected and measured using today’s technological capabilities. But what? Those mysterious forces could perhaps be from undiscovered types of particles that are changing the muon’s magnetic strength. That slight deviation indicates that other particles or forces not accounted for by the Standard Model are influencing the muon particles. The Fermilab experiment, called Muon g-2, detected particles called muons behaving slightly differently than currently accepted physics theories-known altogether as the Standard Model of physics-would predict. This new finding, he says, “reveals that there must be something else beyond what we currently know.” “We’ve managed since the 1970s to put a lot of things together, theoretically, that explain magnetic interactions and forces that govern our physical world-but there are a number of questions we still don’t understand.”īU physicist Lee Roberts. “Over the last 50 years, our understanding of the subatomic world has become really amazing,” says BU physicist Lee Roberts, cofounder of the experiment and a coauthor on the analysis of the Fermilab results. It’s a breakthrough moment for physics, a field that has spent decades developing increasingly sensitive detectors and technologies to investigate the unseen particles and forces that make up our material world and beings. The experiment’s results appear to indicate the presence of something mysterious beyond the current reaches of science. The findings were analyzed with the help of more than 200 scientists from 35 institutions in seven countries, including physicists from Boston University. There are still-undiscovered particles or unknown forces swirling all around us, suggest new results from a massive experiment conducted at the US Department of Energy’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) in Illinois. ![]()
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