Hungarian physicists may have found a new previously unknown force – BBC News

In a laboratory experiment, Hungarian physicists have noticed the anomaly of radioactive decay, which could be evidence of a previously unknown fifth fundamental force.

Attila Krasnahorkai (Attila Krasznahorkay) and his colleagues from the Institute for Nuclear Research in Debrecen for the first time published the results of its work in 2015 on the preprint server arXiv.org, and in January 2016 went out of their article in the journal Physical Review Letters, where they reported the possible discovery of a new light boson, which is only 34 times heavier than an electron.

But this work remained unnoticed until a group of American theoretical physicists led by Jonathan Feng (Jonathan Feng) from the University of California has not published its own analysis of the Hungarian experiment, showing that the findings do not contradict previous studies and we can really talk about a new form of fundamental interaction.

Recall that modern physics known four types of fundamental interactions: gravitational, electromagnetic, strong and weak. But scientists have realized that this is clearly not enough for the last ten years. The fact is that in the standard model of elementary particle physics does not fit dark matter – the invisible substance of which is believed to be 80% of our universe is composed. Therefore, the researchers started with redoubled zeal to search for new exotic particles and energy carriers

The team Krasnahorkai just engaged in the search for one of these hypothetical particles -. “Dark photons”, which is expected to be involved only in weak and gravitational interaction. To do this, they “fired” the protons in the lithium-7 atoms, which led to the formation of unstable nuclei of beryllium-8, which quickly fell apart and threw a pair consisting of a positron and an electron.

according to the standard model, scientists have been observing a decrease kolichestvoa departing pairs with increasing the angle between the trajectories of an electron and a positron. But in this case, by increasing the angle of 140 degrees to the number of pairs briefly increased and then continued to fall again at the higher angles. Thus, a smooth graph reduction appeared inexplicable jump.

Krasnahorkai believes that at this point the beryllium-8 nucleus shed excess energy in the form of a new particle, which then decays into an electron-positron pairs. Researchers have even calculated the mass of the particle in the 17 MeV. In addition, the anomaly appeared in repeated experiments, and the probability of chance is extremely small.

However, the team Feng believes that the Hungarian physicists found no dark photon, but something else. Scientists analyzed the previous experiments and concluded that there are so-called “X bosons protofobnye” at the time of the jump. Such particles can carry yet unknown force which acts on an extremely small distance slightly more than the diameter of an atomic nucleus.

However, pretty soon physicists can obtain confirmation or refutation of the existence of an unknown light particles. During DarkLight experiment ( “Dark Light”) in the US Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility (Jefferson Lab) scientists are looking for dark photons with a mass of 10 to 100 MeV, firing electrons of hydrogen gas.

Now, with an eye on the Hungarian experiment they will focus on the level of 17 MeV, and this year will be able to confirm or deny the existence of particles and determine the nature of its interaction with normal matter.

As for the “protofobnogo X-boson”, it can be found in the course of the experiment on the decay of “quark-antiquark” in the European organization for nuclear research (CERN), or in the experiments of the Italian National Institute of nuclear physics (INFN) and the Institute of nuclear physics in Novosibirsk Budker.