Fifth force of nature

by **Bad Wolf** Mon 21 Aug 2023, 19:14

This tid-bid caught my attention this evening, 'Scientists may be on brink of discovering fifth force of nature'

I was like a what, a fifth force of nature, go on..

theguardian.com wrote:
Dr Mitesh Patel, from Imperial College London, said: “We’re talking about a fifth force because we can’t necessarily explain the behaviour [in these experiments] with the four we know about.”

The data comes from experiments at the Fermilab US particle accelerator facility, which explored how subatomic particles called muons – similar to electrons but about 200 times heavier – move in a magnetic field.

Patel says the muons behave a bit like a child’s spinning top, in rotating around the axis of the magnetic field. However, as the muons move, they wobble. The frequency of that wobble can be predicted by the standard model.

But the experimental results from FermiLab do not appear to match those predictions.

Prof Jon Butterworth of University College London, who works on the Atlas experiment at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at Cern, said: “The wobbles are due to the way the muon interacts with a magnetic field. They can be calculated very precisely in the standard model but that calculation involves quantum loops, with known particles appearing in those loops.

“If the measurements don’t line up with the prediction, that could be a sign that there is some unknown particle appearing in the loops – which could, for example, be the carrier of a fifth force.”

Spoiler:

The article goes on to talk about how the team is still waiting to confirm the results of why the discrepancy occurred to confirm this or that.

Let's talk about the current [Four] forces of nature.

1. The strong nuclear force
2. Electromagnetism
3. The weak nuclear force
4. Gravity

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Gravity: The attraction between two objects that have mass or energy.

The weak nuclear force: Responsible for particle decay. The literal change of one type of subatomic particle into another.

Electromagnetism: Acts between charged particles, like negatively charged electrons and positively charged protons, responsible for some of the most commonly experienced phenomena: friction, elasticity, the normal force and the force holding solids together in a given shape. It's even responsible for the drag that birds, planes and even Superman experience while flying.

The strong nuclear force: The strongest of the four fundamental forces of nature. It holds together the quarks that make up protons and neutrons, and part of the strong force also keeps the protons and neutrons of an atom's nucleus together.

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These are the literal forces that hold our existence and universe together, but what holds them together scratch

cern wrote:In the 1860s, James Clerk Maxwell recognized the similarities between electricity and magnetism and developed his theory of a single electromagnetic force. A similar discovery came a century later, when theorists began to develop links between electromagnetism, with its obvious effects in everyday life, and the weak force, which normally hides within the atomic nucleus.

Pushing the concept a step further, theorists even contemplate the possibility of including gravity at still higher energies, thereby unifying all of the fundamental forces into one. This "unified force" would have ruled in the first instants of the universe, before its different components separated out as the universe cooled. Although at present we cannot recreate conditions with energy high enough to test these ideas directly, we can look for the consequences of "grand unification" at lower energies, for instance at the Large Hadron Collider. A very popular idea suggested by such a unification is called supersymmetry.

- https://home.cern/science/physics/unified-forces

So now we may be on the brink of discovering this mysterious fifth force of nature. The implications of this gives me goosebumps.

Discuss study