But that alone wasn’t enough to explain the asymmetry.Įver since then, physicists have been on a hunt to find hints of new particles that could further tip the scale. A few years before, physicists had discovered such a scenario in the decay of the kaon particle. He conjectured that there must be some microscopic process in nature that looks different in reverse that way, matter could grow to dominate over antimatter. In 1967, the Soviet physicist Andrei Sakharov proposed a possible solution to this particular conundrum. The theory has held up exceptionally well in experimental tests over the past few decades, but it leaves some serious “elephants in the room,” said Dmitry Budker, a physicist at the University of California, Berkeley.įor one thing, our mere existence is proof that the Standard Model is incomplete, since according to the theory, the Big Bang should have produced equal parts matter and antimatter that would have annihilated each other. The Standard Model of Particle Physics is our best roster of all the particles that exist in the universe’s zoo. The new study is “a technological tour de force and also very important for new physics.” Poaching Elephants “I’m sure it’s hard to be the experimentalist measuring zero all the time, even a null result in this experiment is really valuable and really teaches us something,” said Peter Graham, a theoretical physicist at Stanford University. But it still helps theorists to constrain their models for what unknown particles and forces may be missing from the current picture. The updated measurement disappoints anyone hoping for signs of new physics. The latest results are in: The electron is rounder than that. The experiments are now so sensitive that if an electron were the size of Earth, they could detect a bump on the North Pole the height of a single sugar molecule. Given the stakes, a small community of physicists has been doggedly hunting for any asymmetry in the shape of the electron for the past few decades. If that ball were ever so slightly less round, it could help explain fundamental gaps in our understanding of physics, including why the universe contains something rather than nothing. Imagine an electron as a spherical cloud of negative charge.
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