Physicists are surprised and excited about two experiments challenging the rulebook

Preliminary results from two experiments suggest that something may be wrong with the basic way physicists think the universe works, a prospect that the field of particle physics is stunned and excited.

The smallest particles do not quite do what is expected of them, while rotating two different long-term experiments in the United States and Europe. The confusing results – if proven correct – reveal major problems with the rulebook that physicists use to describe and understand how the universe works on a subatomic level.

Theoretical physicist Matthew McCullough of CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, said that the mystery of the mysteries ‘we can go beyond our current understanding of nature’.

The rulebook, called the standard model, was developed about 50 years ago. Experiments carried out over decades have repeatedly confirmed that the descriptions of the particles and the forces that make up and govern the universe were almost accurate. Until now.

“New particles, new physics can only be beyond our research,” said particle physicist Wayne State University Alexey Petrov. “This is annoying.”

The US Department of Energy’s Fermilab on Wednesday announced the results of 8.2 billion races along a track outside Chicago that although most people are excited physicists: the magnetic field around a volatile subatomic particle is not what the standard model says it should be . This follows new results published last month by CERN’s Large Hadron Collider, which found a surprising share of particles in the aftermath of rapid collisions.

Petrov, who was not involved in any of the experiments, was initially skeptical about the Large Hadron Collider results when tips first appeared in 2014. With the latest, more comprehensive results, he said he is now ‘cautiously ecstatic’.

The purpose of the experiments, explains Johns Hopkins University theoretical physicist David Kaplan, is to pull particles apart and find out if ‘something funny is going on’ with both particles and the seemingly empty space between them.

‘The secrets do not just live in the case. They live in something that apparently fills all the space and time. These are quantum fields, ”said Kaplan. “We put energy in the vacuum and see what comes out.”

Both sets of results involve the strange, volatile particle called the muon. The muon is the heavier cousin of the electron orbiting the center of an atom. But the muon is not part of the atom, it is unstable and normally exists only for two microseconds. After being discovered in cosmic rays in 1936, it so confused scientists that a famous physicist asked, “Who ordered it?”

“From the beginning, it puzzled physicists,” said Graziano Venanzoni, an experimental physicist from an Italian national laboratory, who is one of the best scientists in the American Fermilab experiment, named Muon g-2.

The experiment sends muons around a magnetized orbit that holds the particles long enough for researchers to view them more closely. Preliminary results indicate that the magnetic “turn” of the muons is 0.1% discount that the standard model predicts. It may not sound like much, but for particle physicists it’s big – more than enough to advance the current concept.

Researchers need another year or two to complete the results of all the laps around the 50-foot (14-meter) orbit. If the results do not change, it will be an important discovery, Venanzoni said.

Separately, at the world’s largest atomic breaker in CERN, physicists crashed protons against each other there to see what happens next. One of the particle collisions’ different separate experiments measures what happens when particles called beauty or lower quarks collide.

The standard model predicts that these beauty quark accidents should result in equal numbers of electrons and muons. It’s like tossing a coin 1,000 times and getting about the same number of heads and tails, Hadron Collider beauty experiment chief Chris Parkes said.

But that’s not what happened.

Researchers said Sheldon Stone of Syracuse University said the researchers tossed over the data from several years and several thousand accidents and found a 15% difference, with significantly more electrons than muons.

No experiment is yet called an official discovery because there is still a small chance that the results are statistical features. Carrying out the experiments multiple times – planned in both cases – could meet the incredibly stringent statistical requirements for physics within a year or two to label it a discovery, researchers said.

If the results do hold, it will increase “every other calculation made” in the world of particle physics, Kaplan said.

‘It’s not a fudge factor. This is something wrong, “said Kaplan.

He explained that there could be some kind of undiscovered particle – or force – that could explain both strange results.

Or it could be mistakes. In 2011, it was a strange finding that a particle called neutrino moves faster than light, and this threatens the model, but this appears to be the result of a loose electrical connection problem in the experiment.

“We checked all our cable connections and we did everything in our power to check our data,” Stone said. “We’re confident, but you never know.”

AP author Jamey Keaten in Geneva contributed to this report.

Follow Seth Borenstein on Twitter @borenbears.