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New Boson Appears in Nuclear Decay, Breaks Standard Model

posted by Fnord666 on Saturday December 21 2019, @06:49AM   
from the dark-matter-here-we-come dept.

Freeman writes:

In the world of physics, nothing gets the blood flowing like the thought that a new particle has been discovered.

[...]This result has been cooking for quite some time. The first experimental results date back to 2015, with publication in 2016.

[...]The paper really got the juices flowing. Theorists jumped on the result so fast they inadvertently broke special relativity.

[...]The theory situation is even more of a mess. It is always possible to extend our models of the Universe to include new particles, including new bosons and new forces. But, it isn't good enough to match a single experimental result. You have to match all of them.

[...]So, why did this story flare back up again? A new paper, by the same scientists that published the beryllium results. This time, they measured electron-positron emissions from excited helium. Same experiment, different atom, but the same 17MeV boson was found.

The new result is pretty strong evidence.

[...]If they find the boson, then, great, they've won plaudits for someone else. But, if that gun doesn't smoke, there will be a long and painful search for what makes the original experiment different from the rest.

ArXiv.org, 2019, ID: 1910.10459

https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/12/new-boson-hidden-in-beryllium-decay-check-new-physics-maybe/

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Original Submission

• Breaks What? Breaks What? (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 21 2019, @12:34PM (1 child)

  by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 21 2019, @12:34PM (#934957)

  I believe the result is not on solid ground (no careful study of systematic effects - what am I saying, no study at all of systematics!, only one background model cited, and further, one extracted from data selected arbitrarily, it seems). This does not mean they cannot possibly have bumped into something interesting: but if I were the referee of their article, my assessment would be "MAJOR REVISIONS, and run a F***ING SPELL-CHECKER before you even think of resubmitting!" [science20.com]

  • Re:Breaks What? (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 21 2019, @01:07PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 21 2019, @01:07PM (#934964)

    By the laws of quantum mechanics, their spelling is in a superposition of right and wrong until someone reads it.

    Parent

• re DUP (Score: 2) by jelizondo on Saturday December 21 2019, @02:29PM

  by jelizondo (653) on Saturday December 21 2019, @02:29PM (#934979) Journal

  Posting a duplicate article [soylentnews.org]. Different source, same shit.

  Same answer [soylentnews.org] applies: nothing has been discovered.

• no need for new fundamental particles (Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday December 21 2019, @04:15PM

  by khallow (3766) on Saturday December 21 2019, @04:15PM (#934998) Journal

  Notice that the two systems in which the boson has been discovered are both atom nuclei. That means constrained systems with spherical symmetries (both the nucleus and its constituent particles) in addition to the usual baked in force symmetries, and lots of massive particles. All you would need is a spontaneous symmetry breaking (well with the additional condition that the equations of motion are also breaking the symmetry) that is independent of the charge of the atom, and you have a spin-0 boson (or a scalar field). A classic example of a scalar field is a real or complex number that varies over a space, such as air density or mean sound volume in a room.
  
  The phenomena is called a Goldstone boson [wikipedia.org]. Any time a system has symmetries, but the lowest energy states can't be symmetric, you get a math model where there is effectively a spin-0 or scalar boson present. For a classical physics example, a bowl with a large inverse dimple rising in the center would force low energy marbles into a ring around the dimple. The bowl has symmetry around the center, but the marbles by necessity are always off center.
  
  So what could be happening is that some obscure interaction of the bombardment (latest experiment seems to be whacking He4 with tritium, H-3 and looking for electron and positrons that pop off) with the nucleus constituents or the aggregate electric field that is off-center in some way (can be off center with respect to a proton or neutron, or off center with respect to the nucleus's center of mass) at the given energy levels and in a way that yields the same boson energy. Thus, no new fundamental physics need apply. It may instead be a feature of interactions of groups of subatomic particles.