![]() The 11 biggest unanswered questions about dark matter The 18 biggest unsolved mysteries in physics If one of their masses is small enough, it could have evaded detection in our accelerator experiments, but would still be floating around in space. They might still be inhabiting the present-day cosmos. The new particles don't have a role limited to the early universe, either. They would act a lot like an axion, another hypothetical particle that has been introduced in an attempt to explain the nature of the strong force. The newly proposed particles modify the strong force, leading to the charge-parity symmetry that exists in nature. The interactions of these two new particles set the mass of the Higgs in different regions of the multiverse.Īnd those two new particles are also capable of doing other things. These particles would be new additions to the Standard Model. To make a multiverse with varying Higgs masses, the team had to introduce two more particles into the mix. Only the regions of the multiverse that have low Higgs masses survive and have stable expansion rates, leading to the development of galaxies, stars, planets and eventually high-energy particle colliders. The researchers found that universes with a large Higgs mass find themselves catastrophically collapsing before they get a chance to grow. Instead, what we call "our universe" is just one tiny patch of a much larger cosmos that is constantly and rapidly inflating and constantly popping off new universes, like foamy suds in your bathtub.ĭifferent regions of this "multiverse" will have different values of the Higgs mass. Physicists aren't exactly sure what powered inflation or how it worked, but one outgrowth of the basic idea is that our universe has never stopped inflating. Inflation is the idea that in the earliest days of the Big Bang, our cosmos underwent a period of extremely enhanced expansion, doubling in size every billionth of a second. They invoked an idea called the multiverse, which is born out of a theory called inflation. Their solution: The universe was just born that way. In a paper published in January to the journal Physical Review Letters, they outlined their solution to the twin conundrums. (Image credit: Maximilien Brice/CERN) (opens in new tab) A matter of multiversesĪ pair of theorists, Raffaele Tito D'Agnolo of the French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission (CEA) and Daniele Teresi of CERN, thought that these two problems might be related. The world's largest atom smasher, the Large Hadron Collider, forms a 17-mile-long (27 kilometers) ring under the French-Swiss border. ![]() No known natural phenomena should enforce that symmetry, and yet nature seems to be obeying it. But the mathematics of the strong force do not show that same symmetry. In all experiments performed to date, the strong force appears to obey the combined symmetry of both charge reversal and parity reversal. ![]() For example, there is the symmetry of charge (change all the electric charges in an interaction and everything operates the same), the symmetry of time (run a reaction backward and it's the same), and the symmetry of parity (flip an interaction around to its mirror-image and it's the same). In the mathematics that physicists use to describe high-energy interactions, there are certain symmetries. In another, and initially unrelated problem, the strong force isn't exactly behaving as the Standard Model predicts it should. So once the champagne was opened and the Nobel prizes were handed out, the question loomed: Why does the Higgs have such a low mass? But back-of-the-envelope calculations made physicists guess that the Higgs would have an incredibly large mass. For that theory to work, the number has to be derived experimentally. To be perfectly clear, the framework physicists use to describe the zoo of subatomic particles, known as the Standard Model, doesn't actually predict the value of the Higgs mass. The Higgs had a mass of 125 gigaelectronvolts (GeV), which was orders of magnitude smaller than what physicists had thought it should be.
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