A Fifth Force of Nature May Have Been Discovered Inside Atoms
Every action in physics is governed by some kind of push or pull. As far as we know, these all fall into one of just four categories; electromagnetism, gravity, and two kinds of nuclear force.
Yet there could well be forces hidden deep within the tiny storms of particle dynamics that have been simply too subtle to easily detect.
Physicists from Germany, Switzerland, and Australia have now placed new restrictions on where one example of a 'fifth' force may be hiding in the hearts of atoms, exchanging whispers between electrons and neutrons.
As handy as our Standard Model of physics is at explaining cosmic and quantum phenomena, there are glaring gaps that leave physicists scratching their heads.
Dark matter remains elusive, for example. Nobody knows why one kind of matter came to dominate after the Big Bang. And gravity is the most questionable member of the force family, lacking a quantum theory to explain its behavior.
Introducing new fields and particles could go a long way to extending the model, and just maybe help explain these mysterious phenomena.
A Yukawa particle is the hypothesized mediator of a possible force within the cores of atoms. If it exists, it would have a subtle influence on how particles making up an atom's nucleus interact with each other, and possibly how they interact with electrons.
Unlike recent attempts to tease out the force's predicted effects on a cosmic scale, physicists behind this latest investigation turned their focus to a far smaller space in the orbitals around the nuclei of four different kinds of calcium.
Electrons are typically confined to their neighborhoods by their attraction to the positively charged particles in the center. Give them a kick, however, and they'll briefly visit a higher orbit in what's known as an atomic transition.
The precise timing of this jump depends largely on the way the nucleus is constructed, meaning an element can have different atomic transitions, each depending on the number of neutrons it has.
Mapping these variations results in something called a King plot, which ought to be predicted in a relatively straight-forward manner by the Standard Model. Finding examples where the plot doesn't match the model could – in theory – indicate a weak additional force operating between neutrons and electrons.
Using five isotopes of calcium in two different states of charge, the researchers measured atomic transitions to a degree that left some wiggle room for a small undescribed force governed by a mediator particle with a mass somewhere between 10 and 10 million electronvolts.
Whatever that ambiguity may be in their calculations, the researchers demonstrated it was largely down to a single factor – which could be a clue towards the existence of a fifth force.
It would take further experimentation and improved calculations to confirm whether any dynamics within their resulting deviations was the result of known physics or the hypothesized Yukawa interaction, but researchers now have a better idea of what to look for at least.
This research was published in Physical Review Letters.
Strange Radio Signals Detected Emanating From Deep Under Antarctic Ice
Light Squeezed Out of Darkness in Surprising Quantum Simulation
Physicists Actually Made The 'World's Smallest Violin' For a Serious Reason
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Yahoo
13 hours ago
- Yahoo
How could an explosive Big Bang be the birth of our universe?
Curious Kids is a series for children of all ages. If you have a question you'd like an expert to answer, send it to curiouskidsus@ How can a Big Bang have been the start of the universe, since intense explosions destroy everything? – Tristan S., age 8, Newark, Delaware Pretend you're a perfectly flat chess piece in a game of chess on a perfectly flat and humongous chessboard. One day you look around and ask: How did I get here? How did the chessboard get here? How did it all start? You pull out your telescope and begin to explore your universe, the chessboard…. What do you find? Your universe, the chessboard, is getting bigger. And over more time, even bigger! The board is expanding in all directions that you can see. There's nothing that seems to be causing this expansion as far as you can tell – it just seems to be the nature of the chessboard. But wait a minute. If it's getting bigger, and has been getting bigger and bigger, then that means in the past, it must have been smaller and smaller and smaller. At some time, long, long ago, at the very beginning, it must have been so small that it was infinitely small. Let's work forward from what happened then. At the beginning of your universe, the chessboard was infinitely tiny and then expanded, growing bigger and bigger until the day that you decided to make some observations about the nature of your chess universe. All the stuff in the universe – the little particles that make up you and everything else – started very close together and then spread farther apart as time went on. Our universe works exactly the same way. When astronomers like me make observations of distant galaxies, we see that they are all moving apart. It seems our universe started very small and has been expanding ever since. In fact, scientists now know that not only is the universe expanding, but the speed at which it's expanding is increasing. This mysterious effect is caused by something physicists call dark energy, though we know very little else about it. Astronomers also observe something called the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation. It's a very low level of energy that exists all throughout space. We know from those measurements that our universe is 13.8 billion years old – way, way older than people, and about three times older than the Earth. If astronomers look back all the way to the event that started our universe, we call that the Big Bang. Many people hear the name 'Big Bang' and think about a giant explosion of stuff, like a bomb going off. But the Big Bang wasn't an explosion that destroyed things. It was the beginning of our universe, the start of both space and time. Rather than an explosion, it was a very rapid expansion, the event that started the universe growing bigger and bigger. This expansion is different than an explosion, which can be caused by things like chemical reactions or large impacts. Explosions result in energy going from one place to another, and usually a lot of it. Instead, during the Big Bang, energy moved along with space as it expanded, moving around wildly but becoming more spread out over time since space was growing over time. Back in the chessboard universe, the 'Big Bang' would be like the beginning of everything. It's the start of the board getting bigger. It's important to realize that 'before' the Big Bang, there was no space and there was no time. Coming back to the chessboard analogy, you can count the amount of time on the game clock after the start but there is no game time before the start – the clock wasn't running. And, before the game had started, the chessboard universe hadn't existed and there was no chessboard space either. You have to be careful when you say 'before' in this context because time didn't even exist until the Big Bang. You also have wrap your mind around the idea that the universe isn't expanding 'into' anything, since as far as we know the Big Bang was the start of both space and time. Confusing, I know! Astronomers aren't sure what caused the Big Bang. We just look at observations and see that's how the universe did start. We know it was extremely small and got bigger, and we know that kicked off 13.8 billion years ago. What started our own game of chess? That's one of the deepest questions anyone can ask. Hello, curious kids! Do you have a question you'd like an expert to answer? Ask an adult to send your question to CuriousKidsUS@ Please tell us your name, age and the city where you live. And since curiosity has no age limit – adults, let us know what you're wondering, too. We won't be able to answer every question, but we will do our best. This article is republished from The Conversation, a nonprofit, independent news organization bringing you facts and trustworthy analysis to help you make sense of our complex world. It was written by: Michael Lam, Rochester Institute of Technology Read more: After our universe's cosmic dawn, what happened to all its original hydrogen? Hubble in pictures: astronomers' top picks Curious Kids: Can people colonize Mars? Michael Lam does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Yahoo
13 hours ago
- Yahoo
How could an explosive Big Bang be the birth of our universe?
Curious Kids is a series for children of all ages. If you have a question you'd like an expert to answer, send it to curiouskidsus@ How can a Big Bang have been the start of the universe, since intense explosions destroy everything? – Tristan S., age 8, Newark, Delaware Pretend you're a perfectly flat chess piece in a game of chess on a perfectly flat and humongous chessboard. One day you look around and ask: How did I get here? How did the chessboard get here? How did it all start? You pull out your telescope and begin to explore your universe, the chessboard…. What do you find? Your universe, the chessboard, is getting bigger. And over more time, even bigger! The board is expanding in all directions that you can see. There's nothing that seems to be causing this expansion as far as you can tell – it just seems to be the nature of the chessboard. But wait a minute. If it's getting bigger, and has been getting bigger and bigger, then that means in the past, it must have been smaller and smaller and smaller. At some time, long, long ago, at the very beginning, it must have been so small that it was infinitely small. Let's work forward from what happened then. At the beginning of your universe, the chessboard was infinitely tiny and then expanded, growing bigger and bigger until the day that you decided to make some observations about the nature of your chess universe. All the stuff in the universe – the little particles that make up you and everything else – started very close together and then spread farther apart as time went on. Our universe works exactly the same way. When astronomers like me make observations of distant galaxies, we see that they are all moving apart. It seems our universe started very small and has been expanding ever since. In fact, scientists now know that not only is the universe expanding, but the speed at which it's expanding is increasing. This mysterious effect is caused by something physicists call dark energy, though we know very little else about it. Astronomers also observe something called the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation. It's a very low level of energy that exists all throughout space. We know from those measurements that our universe is 13.8 billion years old – way, way older than people, and about three times older than the Earth. If astronomers look back all the way to the event that started our universe, we call that the Big Bang. Many people hear the name 'Big Bang' and think about a giant explosion of stuff, like a bomb going off. But the Big Bang wasn't an explosion that destroyed things. It was the beginning of our universe, the start of both space and time. Rather than an explosion, it was a very rapid expansion, the event that started the universe growing bigger and bigger. This expansion is different than an explosion, which can be caused by things like chemical reactions or large impacts. Explosions result in energy going from one place to another, and usually a lot of it. Instead, during the Big Bang, energy moved along with space as it expanded, moving around wildly but becoming more spread out over time since space was growing over time. Back in the chessboard universe, the 'Big Bang' would be like the beginning of everything. It's the start of the board getting bigger. It's important to realize that 'before' the Big Bang, there was no space and there was no time. Coming back to the chessboard analogy, you can count the amount of time on the game clock after the start but there is no game time before the start – the clock wasn't running. And, before the game had started, the chessboard universe hadn't existed and there was no chessboard space either. You have to be careful when you say 'before' in this context because time didn't even exist until the Big Bang. You also have wrap your mind around the idea that the universe isn't expanding 'into' anything, since as far as we know the Big Bang was the start of both space and time. Confusing, I know! Astronomers aren't sure what caused the Big Bang. We just look at observations and see that's how the universe did start. We know it was extremely small and got bigger, and we know that kicked off 13.8 billion years ago. What started our own game of chess? That's one of the deepest questions anyone can ask. Hello, curious kids! Do you have a question you'd like an expert to answer? Ask an adult to send your question to CuriousKidsUS@ Please tell us your name, age and the city where you live. And since curiosity has no age limit – adults, let us know what you're wondering, too. We won't be able to answer every question, but we will do our best. This article is republished from The Conversation, a nonprofit, independent news organization bringing you facts and trustworthy analysis to help you make sense of our complex world. It was written by: Michael Lam, Rochester Institute of Technology Read more: After our universe's cosmic dawn, what happened to all its original hydrogen? Hubble in pictures: astronomers' top picks Curious Kids: Can people colonize Mars? Michael Lam does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Yahoo
a day ago
- Yahoo
A radio signal from the beginning of the universe could reveal how everything began
A radio signal from the early universe could allow us to understand how everything that surrounds us began. The signal – known as the 21-centimetre signal – could finally let us understand how the first stars and galaxies switched on, and brought the universe from darkness to light. 'This is a unique opportunity to learn how the universe's first light emerged from the darkness,' said co-author Anastasia Fialkov from Cambridge University, in a statement. 'The transition from a cold, dark universe to one filled with stars is a story we're only beginning to understand.' The signal comes to us from more than 13 billion years ago, just a hundred million years after the Big Bang. The faint glow is created by hydrogen atoms that fill up the space between regions of space where stars are being formed. Scientists now believe they will be able to use the nature of that signal to better understand the early universe. They will do that with a radio antenna called REACH – the Radio Experiment for the Analysis of Cosmic Hydrogen – which will try and capture radio signals to reveal data about the beginnings of the universe. To better understand how that project might work, researchers created a model that predicted how REACH as well as another project called the Square Kilometre Array will be able to provide information about the masses and other details of the first stars. 'We are the first group to consistently model the dependence of the 21-centimetre signal of the masses of the first stars, including the impact of ultraviolet starlight and X-ray emissions from X-ray binaries produced when the first stars die,' said Professor Fialkov. 'These insights are derived from simulations that integrate the primordial conditions of the universe, such as the hydrogen-helium composition produced by the Big Bang.' 'The predictions we are reporting have huge implications for our understanding of the nature of the very first stars in the Universe,' said co-author Eloy de Lera Acedo, Principal Investigator of the REACH telescope. 'We show evidence that our radio telescopes can tell us details about the mass of those first stars and how these early lights may have been very different from today's stars. 'Radio telescopes like REACH are promising to unlock the mysteries of the infant Universe, and these predictions are essential to guide the radio observations we are doing from the Karoo, in South Africa.' The work is described in a new paper, 'Determination of the mass distribution of the first stars from the 21-cm signal', published in the journal Nature Astronomy.
