A Hidden Layer of Actuality Could Be Lurking Under the Standard Model

Here’s what you’ll study once you learn this story:

• Although CERN’s Large Hadron Collider has made an enduring impression on particle physics, it hasn’t but open up an entire new frontier of particle physics like some scientists anticipated.
• One scientist champions a idea that new physics may very well be hiding in what he calls the “zeptouniverse”—the realm of objects on the dimensions of the zeptometer (which is 1 quintillionth of a meter)—and that the easiest way to discover that universe is thru observing kaon and B meson decays.
• Future colliders will seemingly be capable of instantly observe the zeptouniverse, however for now, learning these decays may assist us discover new physics inside the decade.

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We people have gotten fairly good at glimpsing the invisible. The Large Hadron Collider—our premier instrument for exploring the subatomic—can completely discover the world of the attometer, which is (extremely) simply one-quintillionth of a meter. Famously, the LHC confirmed the existence of the Higgs boson in 2012, and physicists ready for a rush of latest particles to clarify lingering mysteries of the universe just like the existence of darkish matter and matter-antimatter asymmetry.

But that explosion of discovery didn’t actually materialize. That’s definitely to not say nothing has occurred since then, however no main revelations on par with the Higgs have been found since. And now, a new article in New Scientist, written by particle physicist Harry Cliff who works on the LHCb experiment, particulars one idea as to why we haven’t discovered what we had been anticipating to search out. At its most simple, many of those revelations may very well be hiding in what’s typically known as the “zeptouniverse,” which is a world that solely exists on the 10^-21-meter scale. The LHC can solely analyze particles instantly right down to 50 zeptometers, however Cliff highlights a idea—largely championed by Technical University of Munich theoretical physicist Andrzej Buras—that these elusive particles may merely be past LHC’s detection capabilities.

Of course, a greater detector may open up this frontier—CERN accomplished a feasibility examine for the Future Circular Collider (FCC) simply earlier this yr. But Buras believes that we will discover this frontier of latest physics not directly with out the necessity to wait the a number of many years required to lastly probe this query (the FCC received’t carry out high-energy physics till 2070). In 2020, Buras explored this query in an article for Physik Journal, writing:

Can we attain the Zeptouniverse, i.e., a decision as excessive as 10^–21m or energies as massive as 200 TeV, via quark flavour physics and lepton flavour violating processes on this decade effectively earlier than this might be doable via any collider constructed on this century?

In a paper uploaded to the preprint server arXiv final yr, Buras recognized seven possible targets for this investigation, which he dubbed the “magnificent seven,” in accordance with New Scientist. All seven are extraordinarily uncommon decays of particles containing unusual and backside quarks, which Cliff calls “echoes from the zeptouniverse.” Luckily for Buras, some experiments are already looking for these ultra-rare decays.

One instance of such a decay begins with the B meson—a sort of composite particle made of various quarks, as Cliff explains. In 2023, the Belle II experiment in Japan captured this decay in motion, producing one other particle referred to as a kaon (or Okay meson) and two neutrinos. However, as a result of the experiment wasn’t set-up to instantly detect neutrinos, details about them is restricted.

This isn’t the one ultra-rare decay that’s been detected just lately, both. In September of 2024, the NA62 experiment at CERN recorded the decay of a positively charged kaon right into a pion and a matter-antimatter pair. It’s thought that lower than one in 10 billion kaons ought to decay on this manner. Because this interplay is delicate to Standard Model deviations, it’s recognized as one of many prime targets for locating new physics. Today, the KOTO experiment in Japan is looking for a second affirmation of this kaon decay.

“The search for new particles and forces beyond those of the Standard Model is strongly motivated by the need to explain dark matter, the huge range of particle masses from the tiny neutrino to the massive top quark, and the asymmetry between matter and antimatter that is responsible for our very existence,” Buras wrote final yr within the commerce journal CERN Courier. “As direct searches at the LHC have not yet provided any clue as to what these new particles and forces might be, indirect searches are growing in importance.”

Scientists are solely starting to look contained in the unknown frontier of the zeptouniverse, and till next-generation colliders are up and operating, these extraordinarily uncommon decays are our solely home windows into that universe.