The final results of a long -term experiment based in USAannounced on Tuesday, show that a tiny particle continues to act strangely, but that is still good news for the laws of physics as we know them.
“This experiment is a great feat in precision”said Tova Holmesexperimental physics of the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, which is not part of the collaboration.
The mysterious particles called Muones They are considered the heaviest premiums of electrons. They stagger like a peon when they are within a magnetic field, and scientists are studying that movement to see if it is aligned with the fundamental rules book of physics called standard model.
The experiments of the 1960s and 1970s seemed to indicate that everything was going well. But the tests carried out in the National Laboratory of Brookhaven in the late 1990s and early 2000s produced something unexpected: The muons did not behave as they should.
Decades later, an international collaboration of scientists decided to perform the experiments with an even greater degree of precision. The team ran around a magnetic ring in the form of a ring -The same used in the Brookhaven experiment- and studied its characteristic movement in the Fermi Accelerator National Laboratory, near Chicago.
The first two sets of results – presented in 2021 and 2023 – seemed to confirm the strange behavior of the muons, which led the theoretical physicists to try to reconcile the new measurements with the standard model.
Now, the group has completed the experiment and has published a measurement of the Bamboleo del Mon that coincides with what they found before, using more than double data compared to 2023. They have presented their results to the Physical Review Letters magazine.
That said, it is not yet time to close our most basic understanding than the universe keeps together. While the Muones ran around their track, other scientists found a way to reconcile their behavior with the standard model with the help of super -touches.
There is still a lot of work to be done, since researchers continue to join their heads and future experiments try to measure the bamboleo of the Mones, including one in the Japan proton accelerator research complex that is expected to begin near the end of the decade. Scientists also continue to analyze the final data of the Mones to see if they can obtain information about other mysterious entities such as dark matter.
“This measurement will continue to be a reference point for many years”Said Marco Incagli, from the National Institute of Nuclear Physics in Italy.
When manipulating the muons, scientists strive to answer fundamental questions that have baffled humanity for a long time, said Peter Winter, of the National Argonne Laboratory.