Experiments suggest that the subatomic world may be much more complex than we thought
To find out how the universe truly works, scientists have for decades worked on the standard model of particle physics. When the Higgs boson was found at the Large Hadron Collider almost a decade ago, it was supposed to be the final piece in the jigsaw at the smallest, subatomic scale. Yet this week came the news that there may be new particles or forces that aren’t accounted for in the standard model.
What these might be is a mystery hidden, say researchers at Fermilab in the US, within muons, a bulkier relative of electrons, one of the building blocks of matter. Scientists at Cern in Geneva also think they have picked up something unexpected in muon-electron interactions, contrary to standard model predictions. Do they possess differences besides their mass? The answer might be yes. There are holes in the standard model. It does not account for gravity and does not explain dark matter, which makes up two-thirds of reality, nor why nearly all the anti-matter created in the big bang has disappeared. And it has little about the “dark energy” to which we ascribe the accelerating expansion of the universe.
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