In one of the scenarios I proposed, lightweight dark matter particles could sometimes produce pairs of electrons and positrons in a way that is similar to what Krasznahorkay's team has seen. It would carry force between dark matter particles in much the same way photons, or particles of light, do for ordinary matter. In 2003, in one of us (Boehm) showed that a particle like X17 could exist, in work co-authored with Pierre Fayet and alone. We can infer that it exists from its gravitational effects on distant stars and galaxies, but it has never been detected in the lab.
So-called dark matter would only interact with normal matter very weakly. Scientists believe that most of the matter in the universe is invisible to us. What does this have to do with dark matter? These new results were presented at the HIAS 2019 symposium at the Australian National University in Canberra. Since then the team has repeated the experiment using upgraded equipment and successfully reproduced the beryllium-8 results, which is reassuring, as are the new results in helium-4. Krasznahorkay and his group first reported weak evidence (at a three-sigma level) for a new boson in 2012 at a workshop in Italy. In this case, both the 2016 result with beryllium and the new result with helium can be explained by the existence of X17 but an independent check from an independent group is still necessary. Second, one needs to make sure the very existence of X17 is compatible with the results from other experiments. Back in 2004, for example, the group in Debrecen found evidence they interpreted as the possible existence of an even lighter boson, but when they repeated the experiment the signal was gone. So why is it so hard for physicists to believe a new lightweight boson like this could exist?įirst, experiments of this sort are difficult, and so is the analysis of the data. The new research is led by Attila Krasznahorkay (right.) Attila Krasznahorkay However, the new announcement and the one in 2016 have been met with skepticism by the physics community-the kind of skepticism that did not exist when two teams simultaneously announced the discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012.
This is well beyond the usual five-sigma standard for a new discovery, so the result would seem to suggest there is some new physics here. This latest anomaly is statistically significant-a seven sigma confidence level, which means there is only a very tiny possibility the result occurred by chance. Now they have observed some strange behavior in helium-4 nuclei which can also be explained by the presence of X17. (The Higgs boson, for example, is more than 10,000 times heavier.)īecause of its mass, Krasznahorkay and his team called the hypothetical particle X17. That's about as heavy as 34 electrons, which is fairly lightweight for a particle like this. This particle would have to be a boson, which is the kind of particle that carries force, and its mass would be around 17 million electron volts. This anomaly could be best be explained if the nucleus emitted an unknown particle that later "split" into an electron and a positron. They found a deviation from what they expected to see when there was a large angle between the electrons and positrons. In 2016, they looked at pairs of electrons and positrons (the antimatter version of electrons) produced when beryllium-8 nuclei went from a high energy state to a low energy state. Krasznahorkay and his colleagues at ATOMKI (the Institute of Nuclear Research in Debrecen, Hungary) have taken a different approach, conducting smaller experiments that fire the subatomic particles called protons at the nuclei of different atoms. A Black Hole Swallowing a Neutron Star May Have Been Observed by ScientistsĪttila J.Calculator Tells You What Will Happen If Earth Is Sucked Into a Black Hole.NASA Captures Never-Before-Seen Magnetic Explosion on Surface of the Sun.
0 kommentar(er)
