Latest news with #Fermilab
Yahoo
4 days ago
- Science
- Yahoo
Physicists Found a New Clue That Could Reveal the Fifth Force
Here's what you'll learn when you read this story: The Standard Model of Particle Physics accounts for four fundamental forces—strong, weak, electromagnetism, and gravity—but for decades, scientists have wondered if an elusive fifth force might be at work. A new study analyzing the atomic transition of five calcium isotopes constrains the mass of a particle that would carry such a force from somewhere around 10 to 10 million electronvolts. It's still possible that these anomalies could be explainable via the standard model. The Standard Model of Particle Physics is a scientific masterpiece, but even so, it remains unfinished. For example, we still don't know why there is matter at all (a.k.a. matter-antimatter asymmetry), and then there's the whole dark matter and dark energy thing. Another source of some scientific quandary is whether there might be a fifth fundamental force. You might be familiar with the standard four—the strong force, the weak force, gravity, and electromagnetism—but some physicists wonder if a fifth force that couples together neutrons and electrons could also be at work throughout our universe. Now, an international collaboration of scientists from Germany, Switzerland, and Australia have discerned the upper limit of a particle that could carry such a force by looking at transition frequencies of five calcium isotopes. Those masses were penciled out to around 10 to 10 million electronvolts (yes, electron volts are sometimes used as mass measurements—thanks E=mc2). The results of the study were published in the journal Physical Review Letters. To arrive at this number, the researchers observed the atomic transitions of calcium-40, calcium-42, calcium-44, calcium-46, and calcium-48. An atomic transition occurs when an electron—attracted to the positively charged particles in a nucleus—briefly jumps to a higher energy level. These atomic transitions can vary based on the isotope and are influenced by the number of neutrons present in an atom. Once the observations were complete, the authors mapped the variations they recorded on what's called a King plot. According to the Standard Model, this should produce a linear plot. However, that is not what the study found. Due to the high sensitivity of the experiment, the plot ended up being nonlinear, suggesting that the deviations detected by the team could be evidence of a fifth force. That said, as the authors also note, it could also be attributable to something that is explainable within the Standard Model. However, whatever was causing these deviations, it didn't detract from the scientists' ability to set the upper limit of what the mass of the fifth-force boson might be. The search for this fifth force is a long one, and it's a scientific endeavor that's cast quite a wide net. For a while in the 1980s, scientists at MIT thought antigravity could be a fifth force, and another idea known as 'quintessence' gained popularity at the turn of the century. Recently, Fermilab in Chicago thought that they might be closing in on a fifth force, though their final results of the 'muon g-2' experiment largely confirmed the standard model. Other efforts have looked at much larger bodies than just atoms for evidence of the fifth force. Los Alamos National Laboratory published a study last year suggesting that by closely analyzing the orbits of asteroids and sussing out any deviations of those orbit, we could learn something about particle forces we don't understand. That team's ultimate aim, much like that of the team behind this new paper, was to understand the constraints on where this fifth force might reside. For now, the search continues, but scientists are taking more and more steps toward a physics-altering answer. You Might Also Like The Do's and Don'ts of Using Painter's Tape The Best Portable BBQ Grills for Cooking Anywhere Can a Smart Watch Prolong Your Life?
Yahoo
10-06-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
A Blockbuster ‘Muon Anomaly' May Have Just Disappeared
The Standard Model of particle physics—the best, most thoroughly vetted description of reality scientists have ever devised—appears to have fended off yet another threat to its reign. At least, that's one interpretation of a long-awaited experimental result announced on June 3 by physicists at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, or Fermilab, in Batavia, Ill. An alternative take would be that the result—the most precise measurement ever made of the magnetic wobble of a strange subatomic particle called the muon—still remains the most significant challenge to the Standard Model's supremacy. The results have been posted on the preprint server and submitted to the journal Physical Review Letters. The muon is the electron's less stable, 200-times-heavier cousin. And like the electron and all other charged particles, it possesses an internal magnetism. When the muon's inherent magnetism clashes with an external magnetic field, the particle precesses, torquing to and fro like a wobbling, spinning top. Physicists describe the speed of this precession using a number, g, which almost a century ago was theoretically calculated to be exactly 2. Reality, however, prefers a slightly different value, arising from the wobbling muon being jostled by a surrounding sea of 'virtual' particles flitting in and out existence in the quantum vacuum. The Standard Model can be used to calculate the size of this deviation, known as g−2, by accounting for all the influences of the various known particles. But because g−2 should be sensitive to undiscovered particles and forces as well, a mismatch between a calculated deviation and an actual measurement could be a sign of new physics beyond the vaunted Standard Model's limits. [Sign up for Today in Science, a free daily newsletter] That's the hope, anyway. The trouble is that physicists have found two different ways to calculate g−2, and one of those methods, per a separate preprint paper released on May 27, now gives an answer that closely matches the measurement of the muon anomalous magnetic moment, the final result from the Muon g−2 Experiment hosted at Fermilab. So a cloud of uncertainty still hangs overhead: Has the most significant experimental deviation in particle physics been killed off by theoretical tweaks just when its best-yet measurement has arrived, or is the muon g−2 anomaly still alive and well? Vexingly, the case can't yet be conclusively closed. The Muon g−2 Collaboration announced the results on Tuesday in a packed auditorium at Fermilab, offering the audience (which included more than 1,000 people watching via livestream) a brief history of the project and an overview of its final outcome. The heart of the experiment is a giant 50-foot-diameter magnet, which acts as a racetrack for wobbling muons. In 2001, while operating at Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island, this ring revealed the initial sign of a tantalizing deviation. In 2013 physicists painstakingly moved the ring by truck and barge from Brookhaven to Fermilab, where it could take advantage of a more powerful muon source. The Muon g−2 Collaboration began in 2017. And in 2021 it released the first result that strengthened earlier hints of an apparent anomaly, which was bolstered further by additional results announced in 2023. This latest result is a capstone to those earlier measurements: the collaboration's final measurement gives a value of 0.001165920705 for g−2, consistent with previous results but with a remarkable precision of 127 parts per billion. That's roughly equivalent, it was noted during the June 3 announcement, to measuring the weight of a bison to the precision of a single sunflower seed. Despite that impressive feat of measurement, interpretation of this result remains an entirely different matter. The task of calculating Standard Model predictions for g−2 is so gargantuan that it brought together more than 100 theorists for a supplemental project called the Muon g−2 Theory Initiative. 'It is a community effort with the task to come up with a consensus value based on the entire available information at the time,' says Hartmut Wittig, a professor at the University of Mainz in Germany and a member of the theory initiative's steering committee. 'The answer to whether there is new physics may depend on which theory prediction you compare against. The consensus value should put an end to this ambiguity.' In 2020 the group published a theoretical calculation of g−2 that appeared to confirm the discrepancy with the measurements. The May preprint, however, brought significant change. The difference between theory and experiment is now less than one part per billion, a number both minuscule and much smaller than the accompanying uncertainties, which has led to the collaboration's consensus declaration that there is 'no tension' between the Standard Model's predictions and the measured result. To understand what brought this shift in the predictions, one has to look at one category of the virtual particles that cross the muons' path. '[Excepting gravity] three out of the four known fundamental forces contribute to g−2: electromagnetism, the weak interaction and the strong interaction,' Wittig explains. The influence of virtual photons (particles of light that are also carriers of the electromagnetic force) on muons is relatively straightforward (albeit still laborious) to calculate, for instance. In contrast, precisely determining the effects of the strong force (which usually holds the nuclei of atoms together) is much harder and is the least theoretically constrained among all g−2 calculations. Instead of dealing with virtual photons, those calculations grapple with virtual hadrons, which are clumps of fundamental particles called quarks glued together by other particles called (you might have guessed) gluons. Hadrons can interact with themselves to create tangled, precision-scuttling messes that physicists refer to as 'hadronic blobs,' enormously complicating calculations of their contributions to the wobbling of muons. Up to the 2020 result, researchers indirectly estimated this so-called hadronic vacuum polarization (HVP) contribution to the muon g−2 anomaly by experimentally measuring it for electrons. One year later, though, a new way of calculating HVP was introduced based on lattice quantum chromodynamics (lattice QCD), a computationally intensive methodology, and quickly caught on. Gilberto Colangelo, a professor at the University of Bern in Switzerland and a member of the theory initiative's steering committee, points out that, currently, 'on the lattice QCD side, there is a coherent picture emerging from different approaches. The fact that they agree on the result is a very good indication that they are doing the right thing.' While the multiple flavors of lattice QCD computations improved and their results converged, though, the experimental electron-based measurements of HVP went the opposite way. Among seven experiments seeking to constrain HVP and tighten predictive precision, only one agreed with the lattice QCD results, while there was also deviation among their own measurements. 'This is a puzzling situation for everyone,' Colangelo notes. 'People have made checks against each other. The [experiments] have been scrutinized in detail; we had sessions which lasted five hours.... Nothing wrong was found.' Eventually, the theory initiative decided to use only the lattice QCD results for the HVP factor in this year's white paper, while work on understanding the experimental results is going on. The choice moved the total predicted value for g−2 much closer to Fermilab's measurement. The Standard Model has seen all of its predictions experimentally tested to high precision, giving it the title of the most successful theory in history. Despite this, it is sometimes described as something unwanted or even failed because it does not address general open questions, such as the nature of dark matter hiding in galaxies. In the solid terms of experimental deviations from its predictions, this century has seen the rise and fall of many false alarms. If the muon g−2 anomaly goes away, however, it will also take down some associated contenders for new, paradigm-shifting physics; the absence of novel types of particles in the quantum vacuum will put strong constraints on 'beyond the Standard Model' theories. This is particularly true for the theory of supersymmetry, a favorite among theorists, some of whom have tailored a plethora of predictions explaining away the muon g−2 anomaly as a product of as-yet-unseen supersymmetric particles. Kim Siang Khaw, an associate professor at Shanghai Jiao Tong University in China and a member of Fermilab's Muon g−2, offers a perspective on what will follow. 'The theory initiative is still a work in progress,' he says. 'They may have to wait several more years to finalize. [But] every physics study is a work in progress.' Khaw also mentions that currently Fermilab is looking into repurposing the muon 'storage ring' and magnet used in the experiment, exploring more ideas that can be studied with it. Finally, on the theory front, he muses: 'I think the beauty of [the g−2 measurement] and the comparison with the theoretical calculation is that no matter if there is an anomaly or no anomaly, we learn something new about nature. Of course, the best scenario would be that we have an anomaly, and then we know where to look for this new physics. [But] if there is nothing here, then we can look somewhere else for a higher chance of discovering new physics.'
Scientific American
09-06-2025
- Science
- Scientific American
Do Wobbling Muons Point the Way to New Physics?
The Standard Model of particle physics—the best, most thoroughly vetted description of reality scientists have ever devised—appears to have fended off yet another threat to its reign. At least, that's one interpretation of a long-awaited experimental result announced on June 3 by physicists at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, or Fermilab, in Batavia, Ill. An alternative take would be that the result—the most precise measurement ever made of the magnetic wobble of a strange subatomic particle called the muon —still remains the most significant challenge to the Standard Model's supremacy. The results have been posted on the preprint server and submitted to the journal Physical Review Letters. The muon is the electron's less stable, 200-times-heavier cousin. And like the electron and all other charged particles, it possesses an internal magnetism. When the muon's inherent magnetism clashes with an external magnetic field, the particle precesses, torquing to and fro like a wobbling, spinning top. Physicists describe the speed of this precession using a number, g, which almost a century ago was theoretically calculated to be exactly 2. Reality, however, prefers a slightly different value, arising from the wobbling muon being jostled by a surrounding sea of 'virtual' particles flitting in and out existence in the quantum vacuum. The Standard Model can be used to calculate the size of this deviation, known as g−2, by accounting for all the influences of the various known particles. But because g−2 should be sensitive to undiscovered particles and forces as well, a mismatch between a calculated deviation and an actual measurement could be a sign of new physics beyond the vaunted Standard Model's limits. On supporting science journalism If you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today. That's the hope, anyway. The trouble is that physicists have found two different ways to calculate g−2, and one of those methods, per a separate preprint paper released on May 27, now gives an answer that closely matches the measurement of the muon anomalous magnetic moment, the final result from the Muon g−2 Experiment hosted at Fermilab. So a cloud of uncertainty still hangs overhead: Has the most significant experimental deviation in particle physics been killed off by theoretical tweaks just when its best-yet measurement has arrived, or is the muon g−2 anomaly still alive and well? Vexingly, the case can't yet be conclusively closed. The Latest Word—But Not the Last The Muon g−2 Collaboration announced the results on Tuesday in a packed auditorium at Fermilab, offering the audience (which included more than 1,000 people watching via livestream) a brief history of the project and an overview of its final outcome. The heart of the experiment is a giant 50-foot-diameter magnet, which acts as a racetrack for wobbling muons. In 2001, while operating at Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island, this ring revealed the initial sign of a tantalizing deviation. In 2013 physicists painstakingly moved the ring by truck and barge from Brookhaven to Fermilab, where it could take advantage of a more powerful muon source. The Muon g−2 Collaboration began in 2017. And in 2021 it released the first result that strengthened earlier hints of an apparent anomaly, which was bolstered further by additional results announced in 2023. This latest result is a capstone to those earlier measurements: the collaboration's final measurement gives a value of 0.001165920705 for g−2, consistent with previous results but with a remarkable precision of 127 parts per billion. That's roughly equivalent, it was noted during the June 3 announcement, to measuring the weight of a bison to the precision of a single sunflower seed. Despite that impressive feat of measurement, interpretation of this result remains an entirely different matter. The task of calculating Standard Model predictions for g−2 is so gargantuan that it brought together more than 100 theorists for a supplemental project called the Muon g−2 Theory Initiative. 'It is a community effort with the task to come up with a consensus value based on the entire available information at the time,' says Hartmut Wittig, a professor at the University of Mainz in Germany and a member of the theory initiative's steering committee. 'The answer to whether there is new physics may depend on which theory prediction you compare against. The consensus value should put an end to this ambiguity.' In 2020 the group published a theoretical calculation of g−2 that appeared to confirm the discrepancy with the measurements. The May preprint, however, brought significant change. The difference between theory and experiment is now less than one part per billion, a number both minuscule and much smaller than the accompanying uncertainties, which has led to the collaboration's consensus declaration that there is 'no tension' between the Standard Model's predictions and the measured result. Virtual (Particle) Insanity To understand what brought this shift in the predictions, one has to look at one category of the virtual particles that cross the muons' path. '[Excepting gravity] three out of the four known fundamental forces contribute to g−2: electromagnetism, the weak interaction and the strong interaction,' Wittig explains. The influence of virtual photons (particles of light that are also carriers of the electromagnetic force) on muons is relatively straightforward (albeit still laborious) to calculate, for instance. In contrast, precisely determining the effects of the strong force (which usually holds the nuclei of atoms together) is much harder and is the least theoretically constrained among all g−2 calculations. Instead of dealing with virtual photons, those calculations grapple with virtual hadrons, which are clumps of fundamental particles called quarks glued together by other particles called (you might have guessed) gluons. Hadrons can interact with themselves to create tangled, precision-scuttling messes that physicists refer to as 'hadronic blobs,' enormously complicating calculations of their contributions to the wobbling of muons. Up to the 2020 result, researchers indirectly estimated this so-called hadronic vacuum polarization (HVP) contribution to the muon g−2 anomaly by experimentally measuring it for electrons. One year later, though, a new way of calculating HVP was introduced based on lattice quantum chromodynamics (lattice QCD), a computationally intensive methodology, and quickly caught on. Gilberto Colangelo, a professor at the University of Bern in Switzerland and a member of the theory initiative's steering committee, points out that, currently, 'on the lattice QCD side, there is a coherent picture emerging from different approaches. The fact that they agree on the result is a very good indication that they are doing the right thing.' While the multiple flavors of lattice QCD computations improved and their results converged, though, the experimental electron-based measurements of HVP went the opposite way. Among seven experiments seeking to constrain HVP and tighten predictive precision, only one agreed with the lattice QCD results, while there was also deviation among their own measurements. 'This is a puzzling situation for everyone,' Colangelo notes. 'People have made checks against each other. The [experiments] have been scrutinized in detail; we had sessions which lasted five hours.... Nothing wrong was found.' Eventually, the theory initiative decided to use only the lattice QCD results for the HVP factor in this year's white paper, while work on understanding the experimental results is going on. The choice moved the total predicted value for g−2 much closer to Fermilab's measurement. The Standard Model Still Stands Tall The Standard Model has seen all of its predictions experimentally tested to high precision, giving it the title of the most successful theory in history. Despite this, it is sometimes described as something unwanted or even failed because it does not address general open questions, such as the nature of dark matter hiding in galaxies. In the solid terms of experimental deviations from its predictions, this century has seen the rise and fall of many false alarms. If the muon g−2 anomaly goes away, however, it will also take down some associated contenders for new, paradigm-shifting physics; the absence of novel types of particles in the quantum vacuum will put strong constraints on 'beyond the Standard Model' theories. This is particularly true for the theory of supersymmetry, a favorite among theorists, some of whom have tailored a plethora of predictions explaining away the muon g−2 anomaly as a product of as-yet-unseen supersymmetric particles. Kim Siang Khaw, an associate professor at Shanghai Jiao Tong University in China and a member of Fermilab's Muon g−2, offers a perspective on what will follow. 'The theory initiative is still a work in progress,' he says. 'They may have to wait several more years to finalize. [But] every physics study is a work in progress.' Khaw also mentions that currently Fermilab is looking into repurposing the muon 'storage ring' and magnet used in the experiment, exploring more ideas that can be studied with it. Finally, on the theory front, he muses: 'I think the beauty of [the g−2 measurement] and the comparison with the theoretical calculation is that no matter if there is an anomaly or no anomaly, we learn something new about nature. Of course, the best scenario would be that we have an anomaly, and then we know where to look for this new physics. [But] if there is nothing here, then we can look somewhere else for a higher chance of discovering new physics.'
Yahoo
06-06-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
This Particle Isn't Following the Rules of Physics. Maybe the Rules Are Wrong.
Here's what you'll learn when you read this story: For nearly a century, the magnetic anomaly of the fundamental particle known as a muon has served as a means to test theories against experimental reality. Recently, an international collaboration powered by the U.S.-based Fermilab has released its most accurate data on this anomalous magnetic dipole moment, known as g-2 ('gee minus two'). These new results align closely with recent theoretical predictions, and will serve as a benchmark moving forward. The Standard Model of Particle Physics is a remarkable scientific achievement spanning nearly a century, and its predictive power has proven incredibly consistent. However, any scientific model worth its salt also needs to withstand experimental scrutiny, and one of the places those tests are employed is Fermilab. Starting in 2017, an international collaboration of scientists have used data from Fermilab's 50-foot-diameter magnetic ring to measure the wobble of a fundamental particle known as a muon in what is referred to as the lab's 'muon g-2 experiment.' More than 200 times heavier than electrons, muons only survive for a few microseconds, but they have spins that makes them act like tiny magnets. This wobble, or precession, is due to an external magnetic field is called a g-factor, and a century ago, this factor was found to be 2 (hence the name 'muon g-2 experiment'). However, the introduction of quantum field theory complicates this number by bringing strong, weak, and Higgs fields interactions into the equation. This slight deviation from the '2' prediction is known as the muon's anomalous magnetic dipole moment. To better understand this anomaly, Fermilab has consistently released results from its run of experiments that stretches from 2017 to 2023. On June 3, 2025, the muon g-2 experiment finally released its full results, with a precision of roughly 127 parts-per-billion—the most sensitive and accurate measurement of the muon's magnetic anomaly to date. The results of the study were submitted to the journal Physical Review D. 'The anomalous magnetic moment, or g–2, of the muon is important because it provides a sensitive test of the Standard Model of particle physics,' Regina Rameika, the U.S. Department of Energy's Associate Director for the Office of High Energy Physics, said in a press statement. 'This is an exciting result and it is great to see an experiment come to a definitive end with a precision measurement.' Understanding this precise measurement of muon g-2 can help scientists discover new physics, as any deviation between experimental results and theoretical predictions using the Standard Model could point toward unknowns in our understanding of the subatomic world. While experimental physicists work to perfect ways of measuring the magnetic anomaly, theoretical physicists—especially those participating in the Muon Theory Initiative, which released its own update in late May—have largely sorted themselves into two 'camps' when calculating this theoretical prediction, according to Ethan Siegel at Big Think. One camp takes a data-driven approach to Hadronic vacuum polarization and the other uses a computational-based Lattice quantum chromodynamics (QCD) technique. In 2021, it appeared that Fermilab's initial results were much closer to the Lattice QCD computational calculations, dampening (but not eliminating) the possibility of new physics orbiting the muon. Now, with this new calculation in hand, scientists can move forward with renewed confidence in an experimental result that's been a popular test of the Standard Model of Physics for a century. 'As it has been for decades, the magnetic moment of the muon continues to be a stringent benchmark of the Standard Model,' Simon Corrodi, assistant physicist at Argonne National Laboratory and analysis co-coordinator, said in a press statement. 'The new experimental result sheds new light on this fundamental theory and will set the benchmark for any new theoretical calculation to come.' This isn't the end for measuring the muon magnetic anomaly—the Japan Proton Accelerator Research Complex aims to make its own g-2 measurements in the 2030s (though Fermilab says that its initial precision will be worse than their own latest results). Today, this muon g-2 result is a testament of the incredible engineering and multidisciplinary scientific effort required to uncover just a little bit more about our ever-mysterious universe. You Might Also Like The Do's and Don'ts of Using Painter's Tape The Best Portable BBQ Grills for Cooking Anywhere Can a Smart Watch Prolong Your Life?
Yahoo
04-06-2025
- General
- Yahoo
20-Year Mystery of The Muon's Wiggle May Finally Be Solved
Physicists at Fermilab have made the most precise measurement ever of a long-disputed value – the magnetic 'wiggle' of an elementary particle known as a muon. In somewhat disappointing news, that measurement is in strong agreement with the Standard Model, meaning it probably isn't hiding any exotic new physics as some had hoped. A muon is similar to an electron, except it's about 207 times more massive. The way muons move in a magnetic field should theoretically be very predictable, summed up in what's called its gyromagnetic ratio, or g. In a simple world, the value of g should be a nice, neat 2 – but of course, that would be too easy. The muon's magnetic dance is something of an anomaly, and in the same way that pi is just a touch over 3, the muon's g-factor seemed to be very slightly over 2. How slightly? Just 0.001165920705, according to new results from Fermilab's Muon g-2 experiment. This measurement incorporates data collected over six years of particle accelerator experiments. The team says this final number is accurate to within 127 parts per billion. To put that level of precision into perspective, the researchers say if you measured the width of the US to that degree, you'd be able to tell if a single grain of sand was missing. But the really intriguing part of the research is the room it left for new forces or particles to explain the anomalous magnetic motion. A related project called the Muon g-2 Theory Initiative set out to check what the Standard Model predicted for this value. Incorporating a wider dataset than ever, their latest calculation comes out at 0.00116592033. That puts it extremely close to the value gained from experimental means, which leaves very little wiggle room for any cool, exotic physics to be at play. "The anomalous magnetic moment, or g–2, of the muon is important because it provides a sensitive test of the Standard Model of particle physics," says Regina Rameika, experimental physicist at the US Department of Energy's Office of High Energy Physics. "This is an exciting result and it is great to see an experiment come to a definitive end with a precision measurement." As a muon spins inside a magnetic field, its poles should essentially line up with the field. That turned out to not be the case – instead, it wobbles ever so slightly, like an unbalanced spinning top. And if this wobble was particularly extreme, it could mean the muon is being nudged by unseen, unknown particles. A vacuum isn't ever truly empty – thanks to quantum fluctuations, pairs of virtual particles are constantly popping into and out of existence. These brief interlopers to our reality can affect other nearby particles in various ways. Thanks to its relative heft, the muon is particularly sensitive to the influence of virtual particles. So by precisely measuring how much the muon wobbles beyond its expected range, physicists could calculate the properties of these mysterious virtual particles, potentially unlocking a new realm of physics beyond the Standard Model. Hypothetical explanations could include dark photons or supersymmetry. The g-factor of the muon has been a fascinating thorn in the side of physicists for decades. Clues that something was amiss came in 2001, when the first version of the Muon g-2 experiment revealed a wide discrepancy between theory and practice. Further experiments over the decades since led to increasingly precise measurements, while techniques to calculate the predictions of the Standard Model also improved at the same time. And yet, a mismatch remained. The current version of the Muon g-2 experiment was fired up in 2018, conducting a new run of experiments each year until 2023. Data from the first three runs were released in two batches, each seeming to point more and more towards new physics. This latest measurement incorporates data from the full six runs, which more than triples the dataset used for the last release. That data isn't just more plentiful, but higher quality too, taking advantage of improvements made to the equipment. Sadly for those hoping to add a few extra chapters to their physics textbooks, it seems that in this case everything is as it should be. That's not to say we know everything though – dark matter and even gravity don't fit into the Standard Model yet, so there's still plenty of holes left to plug. The research has been submitted to the journal Physical Review Letters and is available on preprint server arXiv. Sound of Earth's Flipping Magnetic Field Is an Unforgettable Horror World-First Study Reveals How Lightning Sparks Gamma-Ray Flashes The Universe Is 'Suspiciously' Like a Computer Simulation, Physicist Says
