Standard Model
Sabine Hossenfelder asks, did the W-boson break the Standard Model?
New find might “upend the Standard Model” in physics? Really? Rob Sheldon has the story
Standard Model doubted at Inference Review
Sabine Hossenfelder: New evidence against the Standard Model of cosmology
Astronomer: Standard Model of the universe needs no modification
Recently discovered giant arc of galaxies may “break” Standard Model in cosmology
Physicist: Fine tuning explains the ugliness of the Standard Model of the universe
Rob Sheldon on the latest effort to pretend that nothing is wrong in cosmology
Has another hole been found in the standard model of the universe?
Hope springs eternal: Are new particles hiding “in plain sight?”
Will the Large Hadron Collider doom particle physics?
Is cosmology “in crisis” over how to measure the universe?
We are told that the Standard Model just doesn’t work: Every night, astronomers post new ideas to arXiv, the open access publishing site. Cosmologists, in particular, use arXiv to engage in timely back-and-forths that formal journals don’t permit. “We’re just holding on for dear life, trying to keep up with what’s coming out,” says Scolnic. And trying to figure out why the Hubble constant calculations don’t match, where they’ve gone wrong, where they go from here, and how our conception of the universe might change from that new vantage point. Something big may be about to happen to cosmology. It’s easy to see where the cosmologists are coming from, in their glee at the possibility that they’ve been wrong about Read More ›
Electron’s nearly perfect roundness stymies the search for “new physics”
The Standard Model of physics holds that electrons should be almost perfectly round. As it happens, The electron gets its shape from the way that positive and negative charges are distributed inside the particle. The best theory for how particles behave, called the standard model of particle physics, holds that the electron should keep its rotund figure almost perfectly. But some theories suggest that an entourage of hypothetical subatomic particles outside the electron could create a slight separation between the positive and negative charges, giving the electron a pear shape. Now, the Advanced Cold Molecule Electron Electric Dipole Moment, or ACME, search, based at Harvard University, has probed the electron’s EDM with the most precision ever — and still found Read More ›
Researchers: Bizarre Antartic particles might shatter modern physics
Recent cosmic ray activity in Antartica is provoking question and speculation: Physicists don’t know what it is exactly. But they do know it’s some sort of cosmic ray — a high-energy particle that’s blasted its way through space, into the Earth, and back out again. But the particles physicists know about — the collection of particles that make up what scientists call the Standard Model (SM) of particle physics — shouldn’t be able to do that. Sure, there are low-energy neutrinos that can pierce through miles upon miles of rock unaffected. But high-energy neutrinos, as well as other high-energy particles, have “large cross-sections.” That means that they’ll almost always crash into something soon after zipping into the Earth and never make it Read More ›