The Prague Post - 'Mystery' boson finding contradicts understanding of universe

EUR -
AED 4.302888
AFN 81.916613
ALL 97.902049
AMD 450.136794
ANG 2.096812
AOA 1074.403591
ARS 1469.848083
AUD 1.794588
AWG 2.108971
AZN 1.994112
BAM 1.952659
BBD 2.367324
BDT 142.853889
BGN 1.957396
BHD 0.441704
BIF 3493.202692
BMD 1.17165
BND 1.498972
BOB 8.090986
BRL 6.384309
BSD 1.172565
BTN 100.422329
BWP 15.653531
BYN 3.837005
BYR 22964.349685
BZD 2.355128
CAD 1.602332
CDF 3381.383512
CHF 0.933815
CLF 0.028754
CLP 1103.414015
CNY 8.405479
CNH 8.416862
COP 4747.094292
CRC 592.730776
CUC 1.17165
CUP 31.048738
CVE 110.834423
CZK 24.648246
DJF 208.79039
DKK 7.461246
DOP 70.349915
DZD 151.915361
EGP 58.229393
ERN 17.574757
ETB 162.720143
FJD 2.632991
FKP 0.863233
GBP 0.862387
GEL 3.175781
GGP 0.863233
GHS 12.18599
GIP 0.863233
GMD 83.777767
GNF 10169.096726
GTQ 8.999755
GYD 244.988501
HKD 9.197398
HNL 30.659247
HRK 7.534062
HTG 153.886066
HUF 400.216482
IDR 19047.814996
ILS 3.924766
IMP 0.863233
INR 100.576119
IQD 1535.961483
IRR 49355.777276
ISK 142.999707
JEP 0.863233
JMD 187.136573
JOD 0.830733
JPY 172.250216
KES 151.693066
KGS 102.461195
KHR 4707.655966
KMF 492.670214
KPW 1054.459685
KRW 1610.246333
KWD 0.357904
KYD 0.977121
KZT 609.236063
LAK 25258.788623
LBP 105052.907426
LKR 352.46937
LRD 235.082884
LSL 20.853146
LTL 3.45958
LVL 0.70872
LYD 6.333192
MAD 10.550712
MDL 19.844334
MGA 5178.521534
MKD 61.525551
MMK 2459.888866
MNT 4204.537111
MOP 9.480393
MRU 46.564706
MUR 53.063981
MVR 18.037076
MWK 2033.019574
MXN 21.798902
MYR 4.980101
MZN 74.93866
NAD 20.853146
NGN 1794.547027
NIO 43.147681
NOK 11.838346
NPR 160.676127
NZD 1.953546
OMR 0.450484
PAB 1.170927
PEN 4.152912
PGK 4.916596
PHP 66.252143
PKR 333.331834
PLN 4.245312
PYG 9344.332196
QAR 4.265507
RON 5.075471
RSD 117.180281
RUB 91.977776
RWF 1694.216302
SAR 4.394421
SBD 9.767962
SCR 17.192081
SDG 703.572951
SEK 11.172057
SGD 1.501066
SHP 0.920733
SLE 26.370592
SLL 24568.92933
SOS 670.108684
SRD 43.730096
STD 24250.799675
SVC 10.259071
SYP 15233.951871
SZL 20.845049
THB 38.247947
TJS 11.261485
TMT 4.112493
TND 3.394536
TOP 2.744124
TRY 46.922963
TTD 7.954729
TWD 34.124668
TZS 3087.299325
UAH 48.973918
UGX 4209.229791
USD 1.17165
UYU 47.015583
UZS 14862.756687
VES 131.56206
VND 30626.943917
VUV 139.782501
WST 3.225978
XAF 655.769778
XAG 0.03195
XAU 0.000356
XCD 3.166444
XDR 0.815567
XOF 655.769778
XPF 119.331742
YER 283.363731
ZAR 20.835285
ZMK 10546.260708
ZMW 28.402891
ZWL 377.270981
  • CMSC

    0.0900

    22.314

    +0.4%

  • CMSD

    0.0250

    22.285

    +0.11%

  • RBGPF

    0.0000

    69.04

    0%

  • SCS

    0.0400

    10.74

    +0.37%

  • RELX

    0.0300

    53

    +0.06%

  • RIO

    -0.1400

    59.33

    -0.24%

  • GSK

    0.1300

    41.45

    +0.31%

  • NGG

    0.2700

    71.48

    +0.38%

  • BP

    0.1750

    30.4

    +0.58%

  • BTI

    0.7150

    48.215

    +1.48%

  • BCC

    0.7900

    91.02

    +0.87%

  • JRI

    0.0200

    13.13

    +0.15%

  • VOD

    0.0100

    9.85

    +0.1%

  • BCE

    -0.0600

    22.445

    -0.27%

  • RYCEF

    0.1000

    12

    +0.83%

  • AZN

    -0.1200

    73.71

    -0.16%

'Mystery' boson finding contradicts understanding of universe
'Mystery' boson finding contradicts understanding of universe

'Mystery' boson finding contradicts understanding of universe

After a decade of meticulous measurements, scientists announced Thursday that a fundamental particle -- the W boson -- has a significantly greater mass than theorised, shaking the foundations of our understanding of how the universe works.

Text size:

Those foundations are grounded by the Standard Model of particle physics, which is the best theory scientists have to describe the most basic building blocks of the universe, and what forces govern them.

The W boson governs what is called the weak force, one of the four fundamental forces of nature, and therefore a pillar of the Standard Model.

However new research published in the Science journal said that the most precise measurement ever made of the W Boson directly contradicts the model's prediction.

Ashutosh Kotwal, a physicist at Duke University who led the study, told AFP that the result had taken more than 400 scientists over 10 years to scrutinise four million W boson candidates out of a "dataset of around 450 trillion collisions".

These collisions -- made by smashing particles together at mind-bending speeds to study them -- were done by the Tevatron collider in the US state of Illinois.

It was the world's highest-energy particle accelerator until 2009, when it was supplanted by the Large Hadron Collider near Geneva, which famously observed the Higgs boson a few years later.

The Tevatron stopped running in 2011, but the scientists at the Collider Detector at Fermilab (CDF) have been crunching numbers ever since.

- 'Fissures' in the model -

Harry Cliff, a particle physicist at Cambridge University who works at the Large Hadron Collider, said the Standard Model is "probably the most successful scientific theory that has ever been written down".

"It can make fantastically precise predictions," he said. But if those predictions are proved wrong, the model cannot merely be tweaked.

"It's like a house of cards, you pull on one bit of it too much, the whole thing comes crashing down," Cliff told AFP.

The standard model is not without its problems.

For example, it doesn't account for dark matter, which along with dark energy is thought to make up 95 percent of the universe. It also says that the universe should not have existed in the first place, because the Big Bang ought to have annihilated itself.

On top of that, "a few fissures have recently been exposed" in the model, physicists said in a companion Science article.

"In this framework of clues that there are missing pieces to the standard model, we have contributed one more, very interesting, and somewhat large clue," Kotwal said.

Jan Stark, physicist and director of research at the French CNRS institute, said "this is either a major discovery or a problem in the analysis of data," predicting "quite heated discussions in the years to come".

He told AFP that "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence".

- 'Huge deal' -

The CDF scientists said they had determined the W boson's mass with a precision of 0.01 percent -- twice as precise as previous efforts.

They compared it to measuring the weight of a 350-kilogram (800-pound) gorilla to within 40 grams (1.5 ounces).

They found the boson was different than the standard model's prediction by seven standard deviations, which are also called sigma.

Cliff said that if you were flipping a coin, "the chances of getting a five sigma result by dumb luck is one in three and a half million".

"If this is real, and not some systematic bias or misunderstanding of how to do the calculations, then it's a huge deal because it would mean there's a new fundamental ingredient to our universe that we haven't discovered before," he said.

"But if you're going to say something as big as we've broken the standard model of particle physics, and there's new particles out there to discover, to convince people of that you probably need more than one measurement from more than one experiment."

CDF co-spokesperson David Toback said that "it's now up to the theoretical physics community and other experiments to follow up on this and shed light on this mystery".

And after a decade of measurements, Kotwal isn't done yet.

"We follow the clues and leave no stone unturned, so we'll figure out what this means."

V.Nemec--TPP