![]() Those faster-than-light neutrinos actually weren’t.įermilab’s deputy director, Joe Lykken, said the CDF findings alone aren’t enough to force a full rethinking of the Standard Model. But upon review, the researchers found glitches in their experimental setup, including a fiber-optic cable that was misattached. When those findings were first announced, researchers claimed a confidence level nearly as high as what the CDF team is claiming now. That was the case for the claim in 2011 that neutrinos could travel faster than light. Although the statistical analysis sounds impressive, there’s still a chance that something threw off the measurement. There could be all sorts of hand-waving to link the too-bulky boson to weird phenomena ranging from dark matter and dark energy to supersymmetry and new arrays of as-yet-undiscovered particles.īut it’s too early for that. If the findings hold up, theoretical physicists will have to turn their firepower toward figuring out how to explain the discrepancy. The CDF researchers say their findings carry a confidence level of 7 sigma, which translates to a 1-in-390 billion chance that they could be explained away as a statistical fluke. “It was a surprise,” the University of Oxford’s Chris Hays, a member of the CDF team, said in a news release. The CDF’s value is 80,433 MeV, plus or minus 9 MeV. The expected value for the W boson’s mass was 80,357 mega electron volts, or MeV, plus or minus 6 MeV. The only problem is, the 800-pound gorilla appears to tip the scales at three-quarters of a pound overweight. ![]() Fermilab says it’s like measuring the weight of an 800-pound gorilla to within 1.5 ounces. That’s twice as precise as the best previous measurement. ![]() This is where the CDF findings, published in last week’s issue of the journal Science, come in: Physicists analyzed huge amounts of data collected at the Tevatron between 19, and came up with a mass measurement that carries a precision of 0.01%. If there’s some measurement that runs counter to the Standard Model, that may point to an opening for revising the theory. A couple of the biggies have to do with the nature of dark matter and dark energy, which together make up more than 95% of the universe’s content. The theory explains how atoms are put together - and its predictions, including the prediction of the existence of the Higgs boson, have been repeatedly confirmed.Īnd yet, there’s a lot the Standard Model doesn’t explain. Knowing the precise weight of the W boson is a big deal because that value is factored into the finely tuned equations that are woven into the Standard Model, one of the most successful theories in science. But for physicists, “roughly speaking” isn’t good enough. Roughly speaking, the W boson about 80 times heavier than a proton. The particle was discovered decades ago at Europe’s CERN research center, which is now home to the Large Hadron Collider, and its mass has been the subject of study ever since. The W boson plays a role in the weak nuclear force, which comes into play in radioactive decay as well as nuclear fusion - the process that makes the sun shine.
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