QUANTUM FIELDS AND FORCES

THE STANDARD MODEL

ANTIMATTER
THE HIGGS BOSON

ESSENTIAL DARK MATTER AND ENERGY

THE SEARCH FOR BETTER THEORIES

GUIDE№15 AND MORE

PARTICLE
PHYSICS
UNDERSTANDING
REALITY’S BUILDING
BLOCKS

EDITED BY

RICHARD WEBB
NEW
SCIENTIST
ESSENTIAL
GUIDE
PA RTICLE
F
EW areas of science have seen such a revolution
in our understanding over the past 100 years or
so than particle physics. Indeed, at the turn of
the 20th century, it didn’t even exist as a field of

PHYSICS enquiry. The first of the particles we now regard

as fundamental, the electron, had only been discovered
in 1897; the atomic nucleus was as-yet unheard of.
What has followed, culminating in the establishment
of the “standard model” of particle physics, has been a
triumph of both pure and applied science, as theorists
have, time and again, predicted the existence of new
particle phenomena, later to have them corroborated
by experiment.
This 15th New Scientist Essential Guide celebrates
those achievements, but also emphasises the many
gaps and mysteries that convince particle physicists
that the standard model is far from a final answer,
and that much remains to discover – from the true
nature of gravity to why the particles of the standard
model are arranged as they are. I hope you enjoy it.
The other titles in the Essential Guide series can be
bought by visiting shop.newscientist.com; feedback
is welcome at [email protected].
Richard Webb

NEW SCIENTIST ESSENTIAL GUIDES EDITOR Richard Webb ADDITIONAL CONTRIBUTORS

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1 | New Scientist Essential Guide | Particle Physics

CHAPTER 1 CHAPTER 2 CHAPTER 3

ORIGINS THE ANTIMATTER

O F PA RT I C L E STANDARD
PHYSICS MODEL

The incredible diversity of our cosmos From electrons to neutrinos and One of the most startling revelations
stems from a handful of essential quarks to photons, the standard to have emerged from quantum
building blocks and their interactions, model of physics relies on a small theories of the particle realm is
now codified by the standard model zoo of particles acted on by just the existence of the mirror world
of particle physics. Arriving at that three forces. Is that enough? of antimatter. Even more startling is
insight involved overturning many the standard model’s insistence that
long-held ideas about how the p. 24 Leptons and the rule of three if antimatter exists, we shouldn’t.
material world works. p. 26 Fundamental force:
Electromagnetism p. 42 What is antimatter?
p. 6 Beyond the atom p. 28 INTERVIEW: Alex Keshavarzi p. 44 The strange world of Paul Dirac
“Muons could reveal other
p. 9 Forces and quantum fields p. 45 Timeline of antimatter
particles we can’t see”
p. 10 Richard Feynman p. 46 The great matter-antimatter
p. 30 The mystery of neutrinos
and his diagrams imbalance
p. 32 Fundamental force:
p. 13 The creation of the p. 49 Majorana’s mystery
The weak nuclear force
standard model
p. 34 Chien-Shiung Wu’s p. 51 Does antimatter fall up?
p. 16 ESSAY: Dave Goldberg
broken mirror
Why symmetries matter
p. 35 The quirks of quarks
p. 20 Emmy Noether’s struggle
p. 37 Fundamental force:
The strong nuclear force

2 | New Scientist Essential Guide | Particle Physics

CHAPTER 4 CHAPTER 5 CHAPTER 6

THE PA RT I C L E BEYOND
HIGGS PHYSICS THE
BOSON AND THE STANDARD
COSMOS MODEL

Few advances in physics captured More than 95 per cent of the stuff in For all the standard model’s
the imagination like the 2012 discovery the universe comes in the form of dark successes, its manifest gaps and
of the Higgs boson, the particle that matter and energy, entities not covered deficiencies have physicists itching
gives all other fundamental particles by the standard model. This isn’t the for something more – theories that can
their mass. In the decade since, only way that our theories fall down unify the forces of physics, including
the Higgs has presented particle in describing the wider cosmos. gravity, on one consistent basis.
physicists with a profound problem:
it works exactly as they predicted. p. 68 Missing dark matter p. 82 Desperately seeking
p. 72 The dark energy mystery supersymmetry
p. 54 ESSAY: Jon Butterworth p. 74 What caused cosmic inflation? p. 87 ESSAY: Michael Duff
How the Higgs was found Is string theory the answer?
p. 76 Beyond four forces
p. 58 LHC, extreme machine p. 90 Hunting the magnetic monopole
p. 79 Fundamental force: Gravity
p. 59 Is the Higgs too dull? p. 91 The lure of anomalies
p. 61 The hierarchy problem p. 94 INTERVIEW: Fabiola Gianotti
“The world needs places
p. 63 INTERVIEW: Peter Higgs
like CERN”
“I have achieved notoriety,
not immortality”

New Scientist Essential Guide | Particle Physics | 3

CHAPTER 1

4 | New Scientist Essential Guide | Particle Physics

Subatomic particles make our universe. We long believed
that atoms ruled the roost, but we now know atomic matter
can itself be broken down into more basic objects.

The incredible diversity of our cosmos stems from a few

handfuls of essential building blocks and their interactions.
This discovery, now codified by the “standard model” of
particle physics, ranks among the most remarkable of the
past century. Getting there involved overcoming many of
our intuitions about how the material world works.

Chapter 1 | Origins of particle physics | 5

BEYOND
THE ATOM
The idea of atoms as the ultimate, T WAS around the turn of the 20th century that
we saw the first glimpses of something beyond
indivisible particles of matter dates back the atom. In 1897, physicist J. J. Thomson was
to ancient Greece. It was the bedrock on investigating streams of particles given off by
metal electrodes placed under high voltage in a
which our burgeoning understanding of vacuum. These particles turned out to be much
the elements, the new science of smaller than atoms and, unlike neutral atoms,
negatively charged.
chemistry, was built from the 18th century The discovery of these “electrons” put
onwards – but it is a picture that has been paid to the idea that the atom was uniform
and indivisible. To maintain the atom’s overall
torn apart in the past 100 years or so. electrical neutrality, Thomson suggested that
electrons were embedded inside it like plums
in a “pudding” of positive charge.
By 1908, Ernest Rutherford, working with his
assistant Hans Geiger at the University of
Manchester, UK, had revealed a different picture.
When fired from a radioactive source, positively
charged “alpha particles” – themselves later
revealed to be the atomic nuclei of helium – largely
passed through metallic foils placed in their way,
deflected by just a few degrees. The atom, it seemed,
incorporated a large amount of empty space.
RAYMOND BIESINGER Follow-up experiments by Geiger and a research >

6 | New Scientist Essential Guide | Particle Physics

Chapter 1 | Origins of particle physics | 7
student, Ernest Marsden, delivered an even greater →-
surprise. Some alpha particles bounced straight back, Chapter 2 has more on the particles -
turned by up to 180 degrees. It was, as Rutherford later and forces of the standard model-
said, “as if you fired a 15-inch shell at a piece of tissue
paper and it came back and hit you”. Two very different models have helped researchers
Rutherford’s interpretation, which he presented visualise the atomic nucleus in the century or so since
publicly in 1911, was that the mass of the atom, itself its discovery. The way neutrons and protons appear
less than a billionth of a metre (10-⁹m) across, was to stick together, rather like molecules in a liquid,
concentrated in a tiny central volume just 10-¹⁴m across. gave rise in the 1930s to the “liquid-drop model”,
That is something akin to a fly buzzing around inside which accurately predicts the binding energies of
a cathedral – except the fly accounts for 99.9 per cent nuclei and the amount of energy fission or fusion
of the cathedral’s mass. The atomic nucleus was born, processes will release, once factors such as charge
as was the idea that there were more fundamental repulsion between protons are taken into account.
constituents of matter than the atom. The quantum mechanical Pauli exclusion
Long after the nucleus was discovered, its basic principle, meanwhile, teaches us that nucleons –
structure remained a puzzle. By the early 1920s, protons and neutrons together – can’t all occupy
Rutherford had isolated a positively charged the same energy states. In this picture, they orbit
constituent, the proton, while working at the in concentric energy “shells”, much as electrons
University of Cambridge. Only in 1932, though, are ordered into shells around the nucleus to
did his colleague James Chadwick isolate the other complete our picture of the atom.
component of the nucleus: the chargeless neutron. Even so, combine the instability of the neutron
We now know that, unlike electrons, neither and the fact that their common positive charge
protons nor neutrons (collectively called nucleons) should make all protons repel each other, and it
are themselves elementary particles. They are made seems a miracle that nuclei stay together at all. This
up of smaller constituents called quarks, plus gluons is one indication that the picture of protons and
that hold them together. Slightly different compositions neutrons isn’t the last word, either, and that other
mean that the proton is lighter by a whisker. It weighs processes are at work on still-smaller scales.
in at 938.3 megaelectronvolts (MeV) – still more than But to fully understand the picture we now have
1800 times the electron’s mass. The neutron, meanwhile, of this subatomic world, we must first go back in
tips the scales at 939.6 MeV. While a proton left on its time again and look at the fundamental concepts
own is stable, or at least has never been observed to underlying today’s “standard model” of particle
decay, a neutron changes into a proton through the physics: forces and fields, and particularly those
process of beta decay, with a half-life of just 10 minutes. at work in the quantum world. ❚

8 | New Scientist Essential Guide | Particle Physics

FORCES AND
QUANTUM FIELDS
When we conventionally think about F YOU fall off the top of a cliff, how does the
ground below “know” you are up there for it
forces, we tend to think of something to attract you? It is a question that has taxed
that happens when two things come into many illustrious minds ever since Isaac
Newton’s universal law of gravitation first
physical contact – the force required to allowed such apparently instantaneous
push open a door, for example. Physicists “action at a distance”. Newton was among
them: he described it in a letter as “so great
today, however, know that such familiar an Absurdity that I believe no Man who has
mechanical forces are products of in philosophical Matters a competent Faculty
of thinking can ever fall into it”.
underlying fundamental forces – beasts Today, we ascribe such absurdities to fields. Earth’s
that work in an altogether different way. gravitational field, for example, extends out into space
in all directions, tugging at smaller objects like the
moon or people who get too close to large drops. Earth,
too, is under the spell of the sun’s gravitational field,
keeping it in orbit.
The gravitational force is today recognised as
being the weakest of four fundamental forces, one
that derives from the existence of mass. Physicists
say that mass is the source of the force of gravity.
Putting it another way, mass is the source of a
field that maps the strength and direction of the
gravitational force at all points in space (and time).
The concept of a force field was actually formulated
in the 19th century in studies of a different type of
force, that involved in electricity and magnetism.
Try to bring the north poles of two magnets together
and you will find that it is very difficult. There is a
repulsive force between the two similar poles. Or rub
a balloon on your sweater or jumper and then hold
the balloon up to the ceiling. It will stay there, held
by an attractive electrical force. >

Chapter 1 | Origins of particle physics | 9

RICHARD FEYNMAN
AND HIS DIAGRAMS

squiggly line. The photon produces

q̄ a quark (q) antiquark pair, while the
e-
antiquark (q̄) decays into a gluon (g),
↘ ↘ shown as a squiggly loop (for
more on antimatter, see chapter 3).
g
Feynman’s method provided not
just a way to visualise these
interactions, but a basic procedure
to turn each possible diagram into an
↘ ↘ algebraic formula and work out the
e+ likelihood of the interaction occurring
q that bypassed the full complex
mathematical machinery of QED.
→t The later Nobel prizewinner
Frank Wilczek once said that many
breakthroughs in particle physics –
For years after physicist Richard he became a leading light in for example establishing how the
Feynman died in 1988, his 1970s the development of quantum Higgs boson, the particle that gives
yellow-and-tan Dodge minivan lay electrodynamics (QED), the quantum all other fundamental particles
rusting in a garage near Pasadena, field theory of the electromagnetic their mass, could be produced
California. When it was restored force, sharing the 1965 Nobel prize and observed – would have been
in 2012, special effort was made in physics for his work. “literally unthinkable” without
to repaint the giant doodles that For a while, QED calculations Feynman diagrams.
adorned its bodywork. seemed frustratingly difficult, Feynman went on to become a
They don’t look like much – perhaps impossible. Feynman’s tireless educator and populariser
simple combinations of straight diagrams provided a simple, of physics across the board, whose
lines, loops and squiggles. But it is intuitive way to literally sketch out books and famous Feynman
no exaggeration to say that these all the possible ways particles in an Lectures on Physics earned him the
Feynman diagrams revolutionised interaction might be interacting with nickname “the great explainer”. His
particle physics, perhaps even each other and “virtual” particles expertise was most notoriously put
allowing the formulation of the popping out of the quantum vacuum. on public display as a member of
standard model of particle physics Take, for example, the interaction the Rogers Commission established
as we know it today. of an electron and a positron (see to investigate the causes of the 1986
Famed for his brilliant mind above). In Feynman diagrams, Challenger disaster, in which seven
and mercurial personality, particles like electrons are shown crew members of the space shuttle
Feynman was a prolific writer and going forwards while antiparticles died. Having done the experiments
thinker. Born in 1918, he first made like the positron, the antiparticle himself, he memorably showed
a scientific name for himself as a of the electron, are depicted with during a live televised hearing how
member of the Manhattan project to arrows pointing backwards in time. sealant rings on the rocket boosters
build the nuclear bombs that were Where the lines meet, the electron would be prone to failure during icy
dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki (e-) and positron (e+) annihilate, take-off conditions, a possibility
in 1945. After the second world war, producing a photon ( ), drawn as a previously underplayed by NASA.

10 | New Scientist Essential Guide | Particle Physics

“Explaining particle interactions
means marrying quantum theory
with Einstein’s special relativity”
As Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell To solve this problem, Planck assumed purely as a
showed in the 1860s, these and many other matter of mathematical expediency that, rather than
effects are all expressions of one fundamental force: being smooth and continuous, electromagnetic fields
electromagnetism. He was able to distil them down came in discrete particle-like packets of energy, or
into a set of four basic equations, describing the “quanta”. In 1905, Albert Einstein took that idea and
behaviour of an overall electromagnetic field. The ran with it. In his Nobel-prizewinning work on the
electromagnetic force followed the same “inverse photoelectric effect, he assumed that quanta are real
square” law as Newton’s gravity: the strength of the and all electromagnetic waves, light included, also
force is inversely proportional to the square of the act like discrete particle-like entities called photons.
distance between the objects involved. The source Work in the 1920s reversed this logic: discrete,
of the force is electric (and magnetic) “charges”, with point-like particles, such as the electrons by then
a crucial difference being that, while there is only one known to orbit atomic nuclei, also come with a
type of mass,and gravity is attractive, electric charges wavelength and sometimes act like waves. This was
can be positive or negative and the electromagnetic the origin of quantum theory: the still-mysterious
force can be attractive or repulsive. idea that provides supremely accurate predictions
An unexpected bonus of Maxwell’s work on of all particle-related phenomena.
magnetism was that his theory turned out to be a Standard quantum mechanics, as developed by
theory of light as well as electricity and magnetism. the likes of Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg in
Visible light is nothing less than a propagating the 1920s, is fine for describing the workings of
electromagnetic field, a “wave” with a frequency in a individual particles in isolation and at slow speeds.
particular range. Similar waves at higher frequencies But to explain their interactions in the real world,
form ultraviolet, X-ray and gamma-ray radiation; at you need something more.
lower frequencies, electromagnetic waves are known In particular, you need to marry quantum
as infrared radiation, microwaves and radio waves. theory with special relativity, Einstein’s theory of
It was a few years later, at the turn of the 20th century, how space and time warp for things travelling at high
that physicist Max Planck was trying to work through speeds. Special relativity says mass and energy are
a sticky consequence of this picture. If you tried to interchangeable, as embodied by the equation E = mc².
calculate the electromagnetic energy radiated emitted Meanwhile, Heisenberg’s quantum uncertainty
by a perfectly absorbing and emitting “black body” principle says particles can borrow energy from
using Maxwell’s classical equations, you came to the the vacuum for a certain amount of time.
absurd answer that the amount of energy emitted These are the key tenets of the quantum field
would tend to infinity as you went to higher and theories that now underlie what has become the
higher frequencies – a head-scratcher known as the standard model of particle physics. Fundamental
“ultraviolet catastrophe”. particles are seen as “excitations” that pop up for >

Chapter 1 | Origins of particle physics | 11

varying periods by borrowing energy from But the basic picture is clear: two electrons, for
underlying fields that permeate the vacuum. instance, repel each other as a virtual photon emitted
One set of fundamental particles, the fermions, from one is absorbed by the other. In this way, each
consists of things like electrons and quarks that charged particle responds to the electromagnetic field
make up matter. Another set, the bosons, consist of the other. The strength of this fundamental
of particles like photons that mediate forces such reaction – in other words, the intrinsic strength of the
as the electromagnetic force. electromagnetic force – is given by a constant known
British physicist Paul Dirac started the ball rolling as the fine structure constant, symbolised by the Greek
towards today’s quantum field theories in the late letter alpha. Its value is 1/137.036. A comparable pure
1920s with his equation describing how relativistic number, related to the gravitational force between two
electrons, and with them most other matter particles, protons, turns out to be about 5 × 10-³⁹, illustrating how
behave. The Dirac equation had a sting in its tail: it gravity is very much weaker than the electromagnetic
predicted the existence of a particle identical to the force, and indeed all the other fundamental forces.
electron in every way, apart from the opposite electric Besides electromagnetism, there are two forces that
charge – what turned out to be antimatter. work only on subatomic scales, the strong and weak
nuclear forces. In the 1960s and 1970s, the theory of the
→- weak force, which governs nuclear processes such as
Chapter 3 is all about antimatter - radioactive beta decays that are crucial, for example, in
how the sun burns its fuel, came to be folded into QED
Dirac’s work led to the development of a quantum as a unified “electroweak” theory of electromagnetism
theory of the electromagnetic force, known as and the weak force. Quantum chromodynamics (QCD),
quantum electrodynamics, or QED. Perfected in meanwhile, is the theory of the strong nuclear force.
the 1940s, this theory has been checked against Transmitted by bosons called gluons, this strong, very
experiment to a high degree of accuracy. In QED, short-range force binds quarks together to make
electric charge is still the source of an electromagnetic particles such as protons and neutrons.
field, but that field has a graininess: it is quantised.
According to QED, if we could look closely enough, →-
we would see that the field around a charged particle, Pages 32 and 37 have more on-
such as an electron, say, is due to tiny particles – the weak and strong forces -
photons – popping in and out of the surrounding
vacuum. The field becomes weaker further from the To many physicists’ frustration, alone of the four forces,
charge because the particles become more spread out. gravity resists explanation in terms of quantum fields
The theory of QED treats the interactions between and the exchange of quantum particles. Although the
all electrically charged particles in terms of the ultimate hope is that it might one day be explained by
exchange of these “virtual photons”. The patterns the exchange of “gravitons”, our current theory of
of these exchanged can be hugely complex, with gravity is Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity,
virtual photons begetting other virtual photons, which depicts it as the warping of space-time. Gravity
and all of these interactions must be taken into thus remains outside the “standard model” – the
account to arrive at correct answers for the strength name given, since the 1970s, to our basic model of
of electromagnetic interactions between charged fundamental particles and their interactions. ❚
particles – something that initially taxed the
visualisation abilities of physicists (see “Richard →-
Feynman and his diagrams”, page 10). Page 79 has more on gravity-

12 | New Scientist Essential Guide | Particle Physics

THE CREATION OF
THE STANDARD MODEL
In the 1970s, the theories describing the electromagnetic and weak and strong nuclear forces
were brought together in a loose association known as the standard model of particle physics.
It has been a wildly successful construct – while being also manifestly flawed.

HE name “standard model” was a again almost at will. Thus, according to the theory of
considered understatement, says quantum electrodynamics, two electrons repel each
theorist Steven Weinberg at the other thanks to a photon, the boson that transmits the
University of Texas at Austin, who electromagnetic field that appears from nowhere and
coined the term in 1974. “I didn’t want it passes from one electron to another. An infinite series
to become a dogma, but more a basis for of such “virtual” particle fluctuations shift properties
conversation and experiment that might of classical, or “bare”, electrons by tiny amounts –
lead to the discovery that it is wrong.” shifts confirmed with stunning accuracy by many
Its basics can be written on a experiments since the 1940s.
postcard. There are the fermions, the It took a little longer for quantum theory to tame
particles that make up matter. These consist of six the other forces. The weak nuclear force was plagued
quarks, arranged in pairs to make three “generations” by unruly infinities that made calculations of all but
identical in all but mass; and six leptons, such as the simplest effects impossible. The way forward, taken
electrons and neutrinos, arranged similarly. There are during the 1960s by Weinberg and others, was to mash
also a handful of bosons like the photons that transmit it up with electromagnetism into a unified electroweak
nature’s fundamental forces between the fermions force that manifests itself at very high energies, such as
(see diagram, page 14). those in the early universe.
All these entities are quantum particles. These Just as in the 1930s, when Paul Dirac’s merging
wave-particles don’t move according to the tidy rules of special relativity with electromagnetism predicted
of classical, Newtonian mechanics, but dance to the existence of antimatter, this theory presaged
probabilities bounded by bizarre rules in an abstract particles that had never been seen: the massive
mathematical space, and their workings are governed W and Z bosons to transmit today’s separated, short-
by quantum field theories. range weak force; and the Higgs boson. The Higgs was
As we have seen, the mathematical structure of needed to ensure that during the breakdown of the
quantum fields gives them an odd property: they can unified electroweak force, the W and Z particles
create particles from empty space and destroy them acquired mass, confining the weak force to atomic >

Chapter 1 | Origins of particle physics | 13

THE STANDARD MODEL
Our best understanding of the building blocks of matter and the forces that glue them together

FORCE CARRIERS
UP CHARM TOP PHOTON

u c t
QUARKS

Electromagnetism
DOWN STRANGE BOTTOM W Z

BOSONS
d s b Weak nuclear
ELECTRON MUON TAU GLUON

H + o
LEPTONS

Strong nuclear

ELECTRON NEUTRINO MUON NEUTRINO TAU NEUTRINO MASS GIVER

iH i+ io HIGGS BOSON

distances, while the photons of electromagnetism Mann’s invention allowed protons, neutrons and all
didn’t, allowing them to zip across the universe. these new upstarts to be portrayed as combinations of
The existence of the W and Z bosons was confirmed two or three of these more fundamental entities. Gell-
in 1983 by researchers working on the Super Proton Mann’s quark idea was too far out for most physicists.
Synchrotron accelerator at CERN, the European particle The new particles broke established rules by having
physics research centre near Geneva, Switzerland. It fractional electrical charges of +2/3 or -1/3, and could also
was a further four decades before the Higgs boson was never be seen alone. Why should reality conform to
found by a far larger particle smasher – the Large Hadron such a whim?
Collider, situated at the same institution – in 2012. The answer came with quantum chromodynamics,
another term coined by Gell-Mann. It finally made
→- quarks respectable by describing their interactions by
Chapter 4 is all about the Higgs- the exchange of eight gluons that carry a “colour”
discovery and its implications- charge, and showed how, uniquely, this force gets
stronger the further you pull two quarks apart. “It could
At the same time electromagnetism and the weak both explain why protons looked as if they were made
force were being unified, the quantum field theory of quarks and why these quarks could never be pulled
of the strong nuclear force, which holds atomic nuclei out of protons,” says Gross.
together, was evolving “from farce to triumph”, in the
words of the theory’s co-inventor David Gross at the →-
University of California, Santa Barbara. Page 35 has more on the quirks of quarks-
That story had begun in 1964, when theoretical
physicist Murray Gell-Mann asked whether the protons And that, largely, was it. Following a period of
and neutrons that make up matter themselves consist mind-boggling theoretical invention, the standard
of smaller stuff, which he called “quarks”. The name model was in place. There was the unified electroweak
came about simply because Gell-Mann liked the sound theory, to which all particles succumb, and quantum
of the word, which he pronounced like quarts – chromodynamics, which affects only quarks and gluons.
of alcohol. The spelling was supplied by a passage Its equations had a powerful symmetry that dictated
from James Joyce’s novel Finnegans Wake. the character of nature’s forces and told physicists what
At the time, physics was badly in need of radical ideas. sort of new particles to look for and where.
Dozens of exotic new particles were turning up in Sure enough, the bumps in particle-collider data
cosmic rays with seemingly no rhyme or reason. Gell- soon began to appear – together with goosebumps on

14 | New Scientist Essential Guide | Particle Physics

The particles of the standard model have been consistantly predicted on paper before they turned up in reality
Theoretical proposal Experimental verification

Establishment of the“standard model”

QUARKS up, down, strange

charm
bottom
top

electron
muon*
LEPTONS tau
*The muon’s discovery in cosmic rays in 1936 came as a
electron neutrinos
genuine surprise to theorists, prompting Nobel laureate muon tau
Isidor Rabi to ask “who ordered that?”

BOSONS Photon (electromagnetism)

W, Z (weak force)
Gluons (strong force)
Higgs

ANTIMATTER Positron

1850s 1900 1920 1940 1960 1980 2000 2010

the skin of the theorists. Evidence for three quarks had theories beyond the standard model, for all sorts of
already been established in experiments the late 1960s, reasons. Why, for example, do particles come in three
but by the end of the 1970s, physicists in the US had generations, with, for example, the heaviest quark
inferred the existence of a fourth and fifth. Finally, in weighing 75,000 times more than the lightest? The
1995, physicists at the Tevatron collider at Fermilab in standard model gives no explanation for this
Illinois found the sixth, “top”, quark. By 2000, the tau “hierarchy problem”, as a deeper theory – perhaps a
neutrino, the last of the leptons to be discovered, had “grand unified theory” that properly unites quantum
also been bagged at Fermilab. On the other side of the electrodynamics and quantum chromodynamics –
pond, the gluon was snared at the DESY laboratory might. Then there are questions like how particle
outside Hamburg, Germany, in 1979. physics might account for the nature of cosmological
Today, the standard model is complete, with every entities such as dark matter and dark energy, subjects
particle it predicts having been discovered, albeit on which the standard model is silent – as, indeed, it is
sometimes decades after the prediction (see diagram on the nature of gravity. All these questions mean that,
above). For Weinberg, the standard model’s triumphant just as the idea of indivisible atoms proved to be far
march has been something quite special. “To fool from the last word, we are far from convinced whether
around at your desk with mathematical ideas and then the particles and forces of the standard model will be. ❚
find that, after spending a few billion dollars,
experimentalists have confirmed them… there really →-
isn’t anything comparable to it,” he says. Chapter 2 looks at the -
Even so, he and his like are still looking for deeper standard model in more detail-

Chapter 1 | Origins of particle physics | 15

ESSAY

WHY
SYMMETRIES
MATTER
One crucial concept underlies what has HE idea that symmetries lie at the heart
of physical laws is old. Aristotle and his
become the standard model of particle contemporaries argued that the stars
physics: symmetry. That is largely down were pasted on celestial spheres, and that
the globes moved in circular orbits. They
to the insights of one outstandingly gifted were wrong, as it happens. As Johannes
mathematician, says Dave Goldberg. Kepler discovered through meticulous
observation in the early 17th century,
planets wander closer and further from
the sun, in the geometric form of an
ellipse. They travel faster when closer in, and slower
when further out. An imaginary line connecting planets
to the sun traces out equal areas in equal times: what
PROFILE we now know as conservation of angular momentum.
DAVE It wasn’t until later that century that Isaac Newton
GOLDBERG explained why this happens, with his universal law of
gravitation. The source of this behaviour was indeed
a symmetry – the symmetry of the invisible hand
Dave Goldberg is a physicist of gravity, which acts equally in all directions from
at Drexel University in a massive body, such as the sun.
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, General relativity, Albert Einstein’s much refined
and author of The Universe in theory of gravity, was founded on a symmetry too,
the Rearview Mirror: How hidden one known as the equivalence principle. This states
that there is no practical difference between a body
symmetries shape reality
experiencing acceleration because of gravity and one
experiencing an equivalent acceleration from a different
source, such as the thrust of a rocket or the spin of a
centrifuge. From the equivalence principle, Einstein

16 | New Scientist Essential Guide | Particle Physics

PETEDRAPER/ISTOCK

Gravity’s symmetry
dictates how planets
orbit the sun

developed his theory that yields everything from Most of the great laws of physics include some
curved space-time and an expanding universe to black statement of conservation, implicitly or explicitly.
holes and gravitational waves rippling through space. Newton’s first law of motion, for example, crudely
Einstein’s work revolutionised our view of the states that “objects in motion stay in motion, and
universe, but also spurred a great deal of interest in objects at rest stay at rest”. That is nothing more
the role of symmetries in physical laws. The person than conservation of momentum, a consequence
who made something concrete and mathematical of the sort of spatial symmetry that governs the
out of that was one of the greatest unsung heroines physics on top of our idealised frozen lake. Send a
of modern physics: Emmy Noether, who formulated puck across the ice and, discounting friction, it will
the theorem that today bears her name (see “Emmy continue indefinitely. But the conservation law only
Noether’s struggle”, page 20). Simply stated, it says holds as far as the symmetry does. A hole in the ice
that “symmetries lead to conservation laws”. will disturb the symmetry, causing the puck to sink
This formalised an idea intrinsic to, but unstated to the bottom of the lake and come to rest – violating
in, the two theories of gravity. For another example, Newton’s first law.
consider a puck placed on a very smooth, very large It isn’t always obvious what is conserved and what
frozen lake. Wherever the puck slides, the lake is isn’t. For a long time, it was assumed that mass couldn’t
the same. Noether’s theorem provides a general be created or destroyed, but Einstein’s famous E = mc²
way of turning that statement of symmetry into said otherwise. Matter can be created, if not out of thin
a conservation law. air, then out of pure energy. Although you are made
Conservation laws are the bread and butter of of molecules that are made of protons and neutrons,
physics, mathematical shortcuts that allow us to those protons and neutrons are made of quarks.
compute physical quantities once and then never Quarks, as it happens, are so light that they make
again. Whatever you start with, that is what you up only about 1 to 2 per cent of your body mass. The
will end up with. This is incredibly useful: think rest comes from the incredible energies with which
how much trickier it would be if the number of these quarks interact. >
hours in the day changed constantly and wasn’t
conserved at 24; it is bad enough twice in the year →-
when the clocks go forward or back. See page 35 for more on the world of quarks-

Chapter 1 | Origins of particle physics | 17

Although matter can be created from energy, energy and time yield conservation of energy, momentum
itself in all its myriad forms adds up to a constant and and angular momentum everywhere, all the time
permanent total. Before Noether, energy was simply (see diagram, right).
presumed to be conserved, an assumption so basic But there is much more. Symmetries in space and
that it became known in the 19th century as the first time might be obvious to the naked eye, yet Noether’s
law of thermodynamics. But do the mathematics theorem’s true strength comes from “internal
associated with Noether’s theorem and it becomes symmetries”. To the uninitiated, the standard model
plain that energy is conserved because of an even of particle physics is nothing more than a list of
more basic symmetry: specifically, that the laws of fundamental forces and particles. But it is a model
physics aren’t changing with time. If they did, energy of internal symmetries writ large, and it was built
wouldn’t be conserved. on Noether’s theorem.
What Noether’s theorem adds up to is a practical The most familiar force it deals with is
prescription for making progress in physics: electromagnetism. One of its assumptions of James
identify a symmetry in the world’s workings and Clerk Maxwell’s unified theory of electromagnetism,
the associated conservation law will allow you to formulated in the 1860s, is that electric charge is
start meaningful calculation. neither created nor destroyed. That idea goes back
But it is also, in a sense, a statement about how the even further to Benjamin Franklin in the 1740s.
universe should be structured. When we look at the Noether’s theorem shows that charge conservation,
universe on the human scale, or even at the level of our too, arises from a symmetry. Fundamental particles
solar system, space seems very different from a smooth have a property called spin, and just as position doesn’t
lake: there are planet-sized bumps and wiggles. But matter on a frozen lake, what is known as the spin’s
take a broader picture, on the scale of hundreds of phase doesn’t change physical calculations. “Turn”
millions of light years, and the universe appears much every electron in the universe an extra degree and
smoother. The assumption is that on the very largest neither energy nor anything else changes. What
scales, the universe is more or less the same. pops out, according to Noether’s mathematics,
As we lack the ability to travel billions of light years is charge conservation.
to beyond the observational horizon of our most Hermann Weyl took this idea of phase symmetry
powerful telescopes, this really is just an assumption, a step further and supposed that every electron might
and it goes by the name of the cosmological principle. be twisted by a different amount and still remain the
It tells us that what we call “down” on Earth is nothing same. Assume this and, almost by magic, all four of
more than a consequence of the relative position of us Maxwell’s equations emerge.
and the rock we are standing on. The universe has no As the standard model has developed, so the
up or down, nor a centre for that matter. Its laws don’t symmetries of interest have become more subtle –
seem to be in any way related to where we measure but Noether’s theorem has been the gift that keeps
them, how our measuring devices are pointed or on giving. It is hard to conceive, for example, that
even when we decide to make the measurements. electrons, the particles that run through wires to
Through Noether’s theorem, symmetries of space power electronics, and neutrinos, which fly through

18 | New Scientist Essential Guide | Particle Physics

Symmetries exist everywhere in nature. Emmy Noether’s
theorem of 1915 provides a way to translate them into laws
useful for calculations

SYMMETRY: TRANSLATION IN TIME

The basic laws of physics do not vary over time

CONSEQUENCE: Energy is conserved

However many times a pendulum swings, with no air
resistance, it will always reach the same height

us by the trillions every second without leaving a

mark, are in some sense the same particle.
Neutrinos primarily interact through the weak
force, which controls nuclear fusion in the sun. But
the weak force is indifferent to whether a particle is
an electron or a neutrino: switch them round and weak
interactions will be the same. This symmetry produces
SYMMETRY: TRANSLATION IN SPACE conservation of a quantity called weak isospin that,
The laws of physics don’t change when you like electric charge, can be used to label particles and
move from one place to another predict how they will behave (see diagram, page 21).
In the 1960s, researchers found that
CONSEQUENCE: Momentum is conserved
electromagnetism and the weak force could in
A rocket flying through free space continues flying
at the same speed, if no other forces act on it fact be generated by a single symmetry, in what
became known as the electroweak theory, a keystone
of the standard model. “Breaking” that symmetry
mass Velocity mass Velocity into two separate pieces produced a bunch of new
interactions, along with the prediction of a new
particle – what we now know as the Higgs boson.
We waited a half-century for the confirmation of
this prediction, which stemmed directly from the
sort of considerations Noether’s theorem introduced
SYMMETRY: ROTATION IN SPACE into physics. It came, eventually, with the discovery
Forces such as gravity emanate equally in all directions of the Higgs at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider in 2012.

CONSEQUENCE: Angular momentum is conserved →-

Comets speed up nearer the sun. The area between Chapter 4 has more on the Higgs boson-
their path and the sun is always the same in a set time
The other pillar of the standard model is the strong
m interaction, which holds individual protons and
neutrons together. The quarks that make up these
particles are labelled with one of three “colours”:
r red, green and blue. Shift all the colours by one and
all strong interactions will remain exactly the same.
Colour symmetry leads – in what might at first
r
seem to be a tautology – to conservation of colour.
m Since that idea was first introduced, work on the
nature of the strong force has found that all particles >

Chapter 1 | Origins of particle physics | 19

EMMY NOETHER’S
STRUGGLE
Amalie “Emmy” Noether was Sadly, Noether’s life after
born in the small German town of discovering the theorem that bears
Erlangen, near Nuremberg, in 1882. her name wasn’t a happy one. She
Despite the fact that her father, came from a Jewish family, and on
Max Noether, was a professor at the accession of the Nazis to power
the University of Erlangen, she was in Germany in 1933, her hard-won
initially forbidden from enrolling right to teach at the University
there because of her gender. of Göttingen was revoked. She
Such discrimination dogged emigrated to the US and taught at
Noether’s career. Although Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania,
she eventually gained both an but died of complications from
undergraduate degree and a PhD, cancer surgery two years later.
no university would hire her for a The reverence that many of
permanent faculty position. She Noether’s colleagues felt for her
eventually became one of the was only increased by her calm
world’s foremost experts in the spirit and support for others in
fields of abstract algebra, algebraic the face of the Nazis’ oppression.
topology and the mathematics of Weyl, whose wife was Jewish
symmetry, working at the University Emmy Noether’s famous theorem and who also emigrated to the US,
of Erlangen and subsequently the says symmetries in the universe later wrote that “Emmy Noether –
University of Göttingen. give rise to physical laws her courage, her frankness, her
But for a decade, she was unconcern about her own fate,
without appointment, pay or formal wasn’t given even an honorary her conciliatory spirit – was in
title, despite the championing of “extraordinary” professorship until the midst of all the hatred and
her work by many of the most 1922. In the interim, she was merely meanness, despair and sorrow
prominent mathematicians of the allowed to serve as a guest lecturer, surrounding us, a moral solace”.
age. Recognising her as an expert unpaid, under Hilbert’s name. But it is her seminal work that is
in the mathematics underlying what By contrast, Hermann Weyl, most celebrated. As Albert Einstein
would become Albert Einstein’s also at Göttingen in the 1920s, wrote in The New York Times on
general theory of relativity, in quickly achieved a prominent her death, “Fräulein Noether was
1915, the eminent mathematicians professorship, despite being the most significant creative
INTERFOTO/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO

David Hilbert and Felix Klein Noether’s junior. “I was ashamed mathematical genius thus far
invited her to Göttingen, then the to occupy such a preferred position produced since the higher education
centre of the mathematical world. beside her, whom I knew to be my of women began”. Others might
Hilbert argued forcefully for her superior as a mathematician in suggest that the last seven words
official appointment, but Noether many respects,” he later remarked. of that sentence are superfluous.

20 | New Scientist Essential Guide | Particle Physics

The workings of the standard model of particle physics – and perhaps physics theories beyond it – are determined by some subtle symmetries
SYMMETRY: the electron and similar charged SYMMETRY: all of the six varieties of SYMMETRY: according to the unproven theory of
“leptons” have a neutral neutrino equivalent quark come in the same “colours” supersymmetry, every lepton and quark should have
a heavier “sparticle”equivalent
ELECTRON MUON TAU
ELECTRON
NEUTRINO UP QUARK
u s t
ELECTRON DOWN QUARK

d c b

ELECTRON MUON TAU

NEUTRINO NEUTRINO NEUTRINO

To keep the balance, when electrons are Particles containing quarks, such as protons and This means there might be as-yet-unseen
emitted in processes such as beta decay, neutrons, are made of “colour-neutral” combinations. particles and new physics
a neutrino is also produced Switch two colours and nothing changes

ELECTRON SELECTRON DOWN SQUARK

d d
NEUTRON PROTON u u
u d ELECTRON
ELECTRON SNEUTRINO UP SQUARK
(ANTI-) NEUTRINO
PROTON NEUTRON

in nature exist in states without colour – “white”, particles that make up matter, such as electrons
effectively. Protons and neutrons are examples of and quarks) and bosons (including photons, the
particles called baryons that consist of three quarks: one Higgs and other particles governing forces). It
red, one blue, one green. The universe as a whole seems supposes that ultimately every fermion has a partner
to be colourless, just as it is electrically neutral, and the boson and vice versa: hypothetical exotics such as
symmetry of the strong force is what makes particles “selectrons” and “higgsinos”. At sufficiently high
like protons and neutrons possible in the first place. energies, the supposition is that an electron and a
Physics is now at the point where new theories are selectron behave the same way, just as neutrinos and
built on the assumption of a fundamental symmetry electrons behave identically under the weak force.
and an informed guess about what that symmetry
might be. Unification is a holy grail of physics: the drive →-
to develop theories that can describe everything in just Chapter 6 has more on supersymmetry-
a few, albeit possibly outstandingly difficult, equations. and other theories beyond the standard model-
What sort of symmetry might unify the electroweak
and strong forces we don’t yet know, but the search Supersymmetry neatly solves many problems of
for such a “grand unified theory” is an active area of the standard model, as well as providing a motivation
physical endeavour. A good grand unified theory for why particles have the masses that they do. In
might predict where all of the protons and neutrons principle, that is. The Large Hadron Collider is hard
in the universe come from. The total number of these at work looking for signatures of supersymmetry,
baryons seems to be conserved too. Experimentally, we but the lack of any success so far suggests we are
have tried to see if protons, the lightest of the baryons, barking up the wrong tree.
can decay into anything. If we ever observe this, we will Even further away is the goal of folding gravity,
have some idea as to whether baryon number is really that original object of symmetric study, and the
conserved, a key clue to a grand unified theory. forces covered by the standard model into a “theory
Of particular interest as we look beyond the of everything”. Indeed, physics is still far away from a
standard model is supersymmetry, a model at final resolution. But in the thrill of the chase for better
the heart of many fledgling grand unified theories. answers, it is studying symmetries that will guide us
Supersymmetry is based on unifying the two major along the way. It is Noether’s theorem that allows us
groups of fundamental particles: fermions (the to magic useful physical insights from that. ❚

Chapter 1 | Origins of particle physics | 21

CHAPTER 2

22 | New Scientist Essential Guide | Particle Physics

The standard model of particle physics is the most accurately
tested theory of material reality – indeed of anything – we have ever
devised. It describes the workings of world in terms of a few basic
building blocks of reality and the forces that operate between them.

So well-tested and internally consistent is this picture of a world

dictated by the doings of electrons, neutrinos, quarks, photons and
the like that it would be easy to see the standard model as a final
answer. But the mysteries and gaps in the model as we know it
suggests this is far from the case.

Chapter 2 | The standard model | 23

 E GO to incredible lengths

LEPTONS to gather electrons. We

generate them in vast
power stations, string cables

AND THE RULE

across the countryside to
bear them to us and install
sockets in the walls of every
room to zap them into our

OF THREE devices. Our dependence

on them makes it a shade
embarrassing that we don’t fully grasp what they are.
It was 1897 when J. J. Thompson observed rays that
would bend under the influence of an electric field:
the charged particles that orbit atomic nuclei that
Electrons were the first of today’s fundamental we now call electrons. By the mid-1930s, we had
found the other components of atoms too: the proton
particles to be found. The discovery within the
and the neutron. But just as things began to look tidy,
past century of two heavier cousins of electrons confusion descended again. In 1936, a pair of physicists
in California who were studying radiation from deep
presaged one of the most fundamental
space noticed a particle that was negatively charged,
mysteries of the standard model – the like the electron, but whose path bent less sharply in
an electric field, suggesting it was heavier.
existence of three “generations” of particles.
The appearance of the muon – a particle like the
electron in every way, just with 207 times the mass –
was so unexpected that physicist Isidor Rabi responded
by saying “who ordered that?”. Four decades later, the
plot thickened once again. Starting in 1974, a series of
experiments at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center
(SLAC) in California uncovered another sibling of the
electron, this one 3400 times as massive and named
the tau. “It is as if someone has put an electron
RAYMOND BIESINGER through a Xerox machine and set the number >

24 | New Scientist Essential Guide | Particle Physics

Chapter 2 | The standard model | 25
 F U N D A M E N TA L F O RC E :
ELECTROMAGNETISM
GOVERNING THEORY:
Quantum electrodynamics (QED)
MEDIATOR:
Photon (predicted by Albert Einstein in 1905)
MAXIMUM RANGE: Infinite

When asking what electromagnetism does, it

of copies to three,” says John Ellis, a particle physicist at is perhaps easier first to say what it doesn’t do.
King’s College London. It doesn’t keep our feet on the ground, Earth
As the contours of the standard model have swinging around the sun or the stars and
become more delineated, it is as if that mysterious galaxies in the universe moving: this is the
photocopying has been carried out right across it. domain of gravity. It doesn’t bind particles in
All the fundamental particles of matter, the fermions, the atomic nucleus, or determine their decay:
seem to come in three successively heavy generations. the strong and weak nuclear forces do that.
“It is an absolute puzzle,” says Martin Bauer, a But pretty much everything else on
theoretical physicist at Heidelberg University in scales between those two depends on
Germany. “Everything would be consistent with electromagnetism. It was James Clerk Maxwell
just one generation; why exactly the others are who, in the 1860s, showed that electricity and
there is just not clear.” magnetism are in fact two aspects of one unified
One way to explore further is to test a principle phenomenon: moving electric currents cause
called lepton universality, which roughly states that magnetic fields, and magnetic fields induce
all leptons behave alike. It means, for instance, that electric currents to flow. Maxwell also showed
when larger particles decay, any leptons in the fallout in his classical theory of electromagnetism that
should be produced in equal proportions when their electric and magnetic fields always propagate at
mass is accounted for. In 2014, scientists at the Large the same constant speed: the speed of light, c.
Hadron Collider’s beauty (LHCb) experiment were Quantum electrodynamics, or QED – the
studying the decays of B mesons. These particles are quantum field theory of electromagnetism –
made of two quarks and can decay in many different reveals that this is because the force’s carrier
ways, making them a pet test bed for physicists. This particle (its “boson”, exchanged between all
time, something odd came to light: there were 25 per charged particles) is the photon, the quantum
cent fewer muons than electrons produced, flagrantly of light. Photons of different energies are
violating the principle of lepton universality. associated with waves of different frequencies,
The following May, LHCb picked up another odd and the electromagnetic spectrum is the name
signal. This time, researchers were looking at a different given to the gamut of them all, from low-
particle decay that generated either a muon or a tau. frequency radio waves past visible light
Again, the tau particles were produced more often to  high-frequency gamma rays.
than the muons. In 2017, LHCb researchers announced As such, electromagnetism is responsible
a third strike: a separate measurement of B meson for far more than just electricity and magnetism.
decays, which again showed about a 25 per cent It binds negatively charged electrons to positively
departure from standard model predictions. “The charged atomic nuclei, ensuring that stable
significance of this measurement is not extremely atoms can be formed and that chemistry –
large, but it has become very interesting because it goes including the chemistry of life – can happen,
in the same direction as other similar measurements,” and is responsible for all sorts of everyday
says Albert Puig at the University of Zurich, forces such as friction that ultimately result from
Switzerland, who works at LHCb. the interactions of electrons at an atomic level.
To avoid getting over excited at such quirks, particle
physicists use a statistical threshold called “5 sigma” to

26 | New Scientist Essential Guide | Particle Physics

 Electron
0.511 MeV

Muon
105.6 MeV

Tau
1777 MeV

define when a result can be classified as a discovery. the various pieces of particle shrapnel, pushing their
A 5-sigma result signifies that the odds are only 1 in ratios away from what would be predicted. This particle
3.5 million of a result like that cropping up by chance would appear and disappear in a flash – too quickly to
without any new physics. Recently, noises from the be directly detected itself. One possibility is that it
collaboration have suggested the original anomaly is might be a leptoquark, a hypothetical particle whose
only getting more pronounced as more information properties allow it to bridge the gap between quarks
comes in, while perhaps not quite yet reaching that and leptons, making it possible for one to turn into
crucial 5-sigma threshold. the other. If the leptoquark were also to fix things
such that certain leptons change to quarks more
→- readily than others, it would explain the unequal
Page 91 has more on the LHCb anomaly- proportions observed at LHCb.
A search for leptoquarks in the 2000s at an
What makes it even more interesting is that two accelerator called HERA in Germany found zilch,
now-defunct experiments, BaBar at SLAC and Belle at but this doesn’t rule them out entirely, because HERA
the KEK laboratory in Japan, looked at similar decays. operated only at a certain energy. One speculative
The Heavy Flavour Averaging research group at SLAC possibility that this might open up is that electrons –
added those results to the ones from LHCb, took an and with them muons and taus – aren’t fundamental
average and arrived at a significance of 4 sigma. particles in their own rights, but composites. The
Tantalisingly close, but that still doesn’t count as electrons whizzing through our electrical wires are
a discovery. All the same, the potential find “would far more complex beasts than we have assumed, and
be so revolutionary, it is important we must take the chunks they are made from might conceivably
the time to be sure of what we are seeing”, says Ellis. combine in other ways – perhaps making other, heavier
If lepton universality is broken, the most popular variants, for example. Under this scenario, the glib
explanation is that an unknown particle appears answer to “why are there three charged leptons?” is
fleetingly during the meson decay and interacts with simply: there aren’t; that is just all we have seen so far. ❚

Chapter 2 | The standard model | 27

 INTERVIEW

“MUONS COULD REVEAL

OTHER PARTICLES WE
CAN’T SEE”
A tiny anomaly in the properties of Why are muons so interesting?
The best way to think of a muon is that it is very much
the electron’s heavier cousin could like an electron, the particle that is present in all atoms.
be the key to some big new physics, Muons have all the same properties as electrons –
except they are around 200 times heavier. In the
says Alex Keshavarzi. 1900s, we revolutionised technology by understanding
the electron and how to manipulate it. The muon is
exciting because it’s another particle we could learn
to manipulate. That could be useful in terms of
technology, again, or in my field, particle physics, as a
way to understand how the universe is put together.

We don’t find muons just lying around though.

PROFILE A person has something like 30 muons shooting
ALEX through them at any given moment. So they are
KESHAVARZI common, but perhaps not by the standards we’re used
to. The thing is, the electron has an infinite lifetime.
But muons live for only one-500,000th of a second.
Alex Keshavarzi is a The reason they are so widely studied is that, thanks
researcher at the University to their mass, they have more energy and so they
of Manchester, UK, who should interact more strongly with other heavy
investigates muons as part particles that might be out there. They’re a useful
of the Muon g-2 experiment tool because they might help us get a glimpse of
other particles that we couldn’t see via electrons.
at Fermilab in Illinois
How do we get a muon to hang around long enough to study it?
One of the tricks is to speed it up, which gives it more
energy. Special relativity kicks in and you get a time

28 | New Scientist Essential Guide | Particle Physics

 JENNIE EDWARDS

Alex Keshavarzi’s Muon g-2

experiment measured the muon’s
spin to deviate from predictions

dilation effect, like you see at the edge of a black hole. chance that the result could have been obtained
At Muon g-2, we speed the particles up so they have a lot by chance. At this stage, we were only at 4 sigma.
more energy, taking their lifetime from 2 microseconds
to 60 microseconds. That is where your new experiment comes in.
Yes, we’re measuring to a much higher precision,
What exactly are you studying at the Muon g-2 experiment? trying to figure out whether this can be heralded
The muon has this quantum property called spin, as the discovery of new physics or not. I am based in
which you can think of as like its own internal bar Manchester now, but worked at the experiment in the
magnet. If you put that in a magnetic field, it will US for a few years. You do have a moment of awe and
precess – like the way a compass needle turns if you wonder when you see the thing. There’s this blue ring
are at the north pole. At the same time, ordinary in the middle, which is where the muons are stored.
empty space can, according to the rules of quantum That’s 20 metres across and you can go and stand in
mechanics, have what we call virtual particles pop up the middle. What always impressed me the most when
quickly out of nothing and then disappear. It’s because I stood there was how you have 20 or 30 different
empty space has a tiny amount of energy and this can electrical and experimental systems that all have to
be briefly converted into these virtual particles. It turns work together, to the nanosecond, with exactly the
out that the rate at which the muons’ spin precesses is right power and sensitivity.
determined by these virtual particles. We can calculate
to incredible precision what that number should be. You released an important result in April 2021.
We actually knew about it a month earlier. In particle
When did we first twig that there might be something funny physics experiments, it’s really important to eliminate
going on with muons? any element of conscious or unconscious bias. So we
We have had hints since the early 1990s. The first apply a thing called blinding, which means all the
Muon g-2 experiment at the Brookhaven National numbers we’re working with are offset by some factor
Laboratory finished in 2003 and showed that there was that is known only by a handful of people. We do the
a disagreement between the predicted and observed analysis, but we can’t see whether the numbers are
numbers. In physics, we look for a result that has what pointing in any direction as we do it.
we call a 5-sigma significance, or a 1 in 3.5 million At the end of March 2021, we had an unblinding >

Chapter 2 | The standard model | 29

ceremony where the people that had hidden the offsets
bring them back and we get the result out. I have to
admit, I was really nervous. The new physics is the more
exciting thing and I was hoping for that. And then we
THE
MYSTERY OF
found that the anomaly was still there, and we had
increased the probability of it being real. There is
now only a 1 in 40,000 chance of this being a fluke.

When might we be at the point of declaring the discovery

of new physics?
The result that we released in April was based on one
year’s worth of data that we took in 2018. As of now, we
are on our fifth year of data-taking. So we already have
NEUTRINOS
three to four more years and the instrumentation has The ghostly neutrinos are among the most
been improved along the way. If the measured value
stays the same and our measurement just gets more mysterious particles predicted by the
and more precise, then we should reach that 5-sigma standard model. Their weird, shape-shifting
level with our experiment. We’ll release another result
at roughly the end of 2022 and we might get there at nature could be the key to physics beyond it.
that point. We should have the final results of the
experiment within five years and that will be the real
decider. We have to push for precision so there is no
shadow of a doubt about any claims of new physics.

If the result is real, what would it mean? EUTRINOS are notoriously hard to pin
It would mean that there are some virtual particles down. They have no charge, almost no
out there that we don’t know about yet. I should add mass and can pass through matter by
that our experiment is sensitive to virtual particles, the millions without leaving a trace.
but any particles that appear in this way would The first inkling we had that they were
also exist independently, out there in reality. Our out there came in 1930, when
experiment won’t tell us what those new particles are. physicist Wolfgang Pauli was
It could be perhaps a candidate dark matter particle, struggling to make sense of the decay
maybe mediated by a new force, or some new particle of certain radioactive nuclei. When an
that could explain the asymmetry between matter and atomic nucleus undergoes beta decay,
antimatter. Other experimentalists would then need to it morphs into a daughter nucleus, emitting an electron
take our data and go and make more specific searches in the process. But the two decay products went in
for the particles. But it would be the first time we could directions that seemed to violate the cast-iron law of
say, OK, we’ve definitively discovered new physics. ❚ conservation of momentum – suggesting some third
particle was needed to make sense of the results.
→- The tiny, chargeless particle Pauli dreamed up was
Chapter 3 has more on antimatter - subsequently called the neutrino – “the little neutral
one” – and was spotted in the wild in 1956. Over the
→- following decades, experimentalists gradually worked
Chapter 5 has more on dark matter - out that neutrinos came in multiple types, or flavours.

30 | New Scientist Essential Guide | Particle Physics

The standard model classifies elementary matter
particles into three generations. The sterile neutrino
would be the first sign of new physics

FERMIONS fusion reactor, powered by beta decays that pump out

LEPTONS QUARKS electron neutrinos by the billion. Some of these come
Charge 0 Charge –1 Charge –⅓ Charge +⅔ our way, passing straight through Earth on their
ELECTRON ELECTRON DOWN UP journey out into the wider universe. Nuclear power
NEUTRINO stations also pump neutrinos out in abundance.

iH H d u As long ago as the 1960s, physicists measuring the

quantity of electron neutrinos reaching Earth from the
sun found a major shortfall, with one experiment
MUON MUON STRANGE CHARM
NEUTRINO detecting only 25 per cent of the expected number.
MATTER

i+ + s c Solving the mystery involved conceding that the

standard model was incomplete. Rather than being
massless, as the standard model assumed, each
TAU NEUTRINO TAU BOTTOM TOP neutrino did in fact have a tiny amount of mass.

io o b
And yet the sum of the three neutrino masses can’t
t exceed more than about 0.3 electronvolts (eV) – more
than a million times smaller than the next lightest
particle, the electron. “Why it is that neutrinos are so
STERILE anomalously light compared with everything else is
NEUTRINO

iV INCREASING MASS
bizarre,” says Frank Close at the University of Oxford.
“It’s as if they want to be nothing and yet weren’t
allowed to be.”
We can’t say precisely how heavy each of the
three neutrino states is, either, besides saying the mass
of the lightest state is about 0.05 eV. That is because
There were neutrinos that Pauli had predicted, with an having a tiny amount of mass gives them another
intimate connection to the electron, but also those remarkable power: they can switch between different
with similar relationships to the electron’s heavier “flavours”, morphing from one into another as they
cousins, the muon and the tau. These three neutrinos zoom along, in a process called neutrino oscillation.
neatly slotted into the standard model, and that Electron neutrinos produced in the sun’s core can
appeared to be that. transform into either muon or tau neutrinos, evading
This is all very well and good, but the nature our searches on Earth.
of neutrinos makes them incredibly difficult to This shape-shifting solved the solar neutrino
snare and study. They don’t feel electromagnetism or problem, but other mysteries remained. The most
the strong nuclear force, which means they hardly vexing of these dates from the 1990s, when an
interact with other matter at all. Catching neutrinos experiment called the Liquid Scintillator Neutrino
is a matter of patience, of watching long enough with Detector (LSND) in Los Alamos, New Mexico,
big enough detectors until enough of them interact. found that the antimatter versions of muon neutrinos
Generally, these experiments take the form of huge were oscillating into electron antineutrinos faster
vats of incredibly pure atomic liquids where the than expected.
neutrinos’ presence is registered through the The result was confirmed by a second experiment,
emission of pulses of characteristic “scintillation” MiniBooNE, which ran at Fermilab in Illinois from
light caused by their passage. 2002 to 2017. Another set of confounding results comes
As it happens, we have a massive source of neutrinos from radioactive decays within nuclear reactors on
right next door, in cosmic terms. The sun is a nuclear Earth: they appear to produce about 6 per cent >

Chapter 2 | The standard model | 31

“Summoning a new neutrino
into existence could exorcise
other problems too”

F U N D A M E N TA L F O RC E :
THE WEAK NUCLEAR FORCE
GOVERNING THEORY: “flavour” of the quarks that make up up from the vacuum and have only
Electroweak theory (unified theory protons and neutrons, for example a very short range. The existence
with quantum electrodynamics, switching a down quark to an up of these particles was confirmed
the theory of electromagnetism, quark or vice versa in beta decay. by physicists at the research
at high energies) centre CERN near Geneva,
MEDIATOR: ↓- Switzerland, in 1983.
W and Z bosons (predicted in 1968, See the next section- In fact, as was discovered in
discovered in 1983) for more on quarks- the 1960s, the weak force and
TYPICAL RANGE: 10-18 metres electromagnetism were part of the
It sounds quirky, but it is far from same unified “electroweak” force in
Of the four known fundamental forces, irrelevant: only the action of the the early universe, until it underwent
the weak nuclear force has the least weak force changing protons into a process known as spontaneous
obvious purpose. Its effects were neutrons within a star like the sun symmetry, breaking as it cooled,
first discovered at the turn of the allows nuclear fusion to get off rather like a phase transition when
20th century, in the place where it is the ground within its core at all. a gas condenses to a liquid, say.
most obviously at work: in radioactive The burning of stars – and so the This process led to the W and Z
beta decay. In the most common form existence of life – depends on it. particles gaining their mass, while
of this decay, beta-minus decay, a The weak force is so weak the photon stayed massless, due
neutron decays into a proton, also because, unlike the massless to their interactions with another
spitting out a negatively charged photon that carries the field and its associated particle –
electron to conserve electric charge; electromagnetic force, the three the Higgs boson.
beta-plus decay does the reverse “boson” particles that carry it – the
and turns protons into neutrons. W+, W– and Z0 – are very massive. →-
This amounts to an ability unique According to the rules of quantum Chapter 4 discusses the-
to the weak force to change the field theory, they seldom bubble Higgs boson in more depth-

32 | New Scientist Essential Guide | Particle Physics

fewer electron antineutrinos than the standard emphatic is the universe itself – the present-day
model predicts. arrangement of stars and galaxies, and the faint
So: too many electron antineutrinos being produced surviving echoes of the big bang. If sterile neutrinos
on the one hand, and not enough on the other. What is had existed throughout the universe’s history, says
going on? One possible explanation lies in inventing a Raymond Volkas at the University of Melbourne,
fourth, “sterile” flavour of neutrino capable of shape- Australia, then their presence would have caused the
shifting into any of the other three. This seems like a cosmos to look different than it currently does.
big deal given that the notion of three generations of What’s more, the reactor anomaly has recently been
particles is deeply baked into the standard model, but, called into question. Several experiments now
as we have seen, the reasons for this magic number are underway have put neutrino detectors closer to the
still a mystery. Unlike its siblings, though, which nuclear reactors than before, allowing for a more
interact solely via the weak nuclear force and gravity – accurate measurement of electron-antineutrino
with the gravity bit being essentially irrelevant, given disappearance. Although the statistical analysis of the
gravity’s weakness as a force and how little mass the data isn’t yet sufficiently advanced to say anything for
neutrinos have – the sterile neutrino would only feel certain, preliminary results suggest the anomaly might
the pull of gravity. This idea was proposed in 1958 by have disappeared.
Italian nuclear physicist Bruno Pontecorvo to allow Results from MiniBooNE released in 2018 muddied
neutrinos to morph into antineutrinos. the waters still further: they showed a larger anomaly
The logic now goes that MiniBooNE and LSND saw than before. Some hailed this as strong evidence for the
more electron neutrinos than predicted because of all existence of this hypothetical particle. But if a sterile
the extra sterile neutrinos that decayed into this kind. neutrino exists, then muon neutrinos shouldn’t just
The reason the reactor experiments saw all those transform into electron neutrinos on their way to a
electron neutrinos go missing was because they had detector – some should disappear as well. Yet muon-
decayed into their sterile counterpart. neutrino disappearance has never been seen.
Summoning the sterile neutrino into existence could During the 15 years that MiniBooNE was ticking away,
exorcise a number of other problems as well. A heavier physicists set up a number of smaller experiments to
fourth neutrino could explain why the other three are probe for this disappearance explicitly. One of the
so anomalously light, for example. Via a process known biggest is called MINOS+, based at Fermilab, Illinois.
as the seesaw mechanism, its increased mass would Over the 10 years it and its predecessor have been
drive the masses of the others down, like toddlers going running, muon neutrinos have steadfastly refused to
up and down on a seesaw. vanish. This places severe limits on what any potential
The same particles have also been proposed as a sterile neutrino may look like, if it even exists.
plausible candidate for dark matter, the mysterious While theorists develop ever more exotic ideas about
stuff known to make up 27 per cent of the universe. what could be out there, experimentalists will keep on
Others say sterile neutrinos could also solve the searching. Using detectors around the world, such as
question of why antimatter, produced in equal the IceCube Neutrino Observatory, an experiment to
quantities to matter at the start of the universe, has measure cosmic neutrinos passing through Earth in
now all but vanished. If so, “three puzzles of modern Antarctica, they hope to place ever-tighter bounds on
physics would find their explanation within one the disappearance of muon and electron neutrinos, as
theory”, says Oleg Ruchayskiy at the University of well as the rate at which one turns into the other.
Copenhagen in Denmark. More experiments are planned soon. One is the Deep
Underground Neutrino Experiment, or DUNE, which
→- will fire an intense neutrino beam 1300 kilometres in a
Page 49 has more on the relevance- straight line through Earth from Fermilab to the
of neutrinos to antimatter- Sanford Underground Research Facility in South
Dakota, where a 70-kiloton volume of liquid argon will
→- register their presence. Such huge undertakings are
Page 68 covers dark matter in more detail- worth the money and effort, says Carlo Rubbia, a
former head of particle physics laboratory CERN. “This
Alas, nothing involving neutrinos is ever simple, and if is one of the areas in which new discoveries are
you thought neutrinos were difficult to spot, try sterile possible, but we don’t know from which direction these
neutrinos. For each experiment suggesting hints of discoveries will come. So we have to take a very
their existence, there is another negating it. The most courageous view to find out what’s coming next.” ❚

Chapter 2 | The standard model | 33

CHIEN-SHIUNG WU’S
Chien-Shiung Wu showed that
BROKEN MIRROR the universe breaks symmetry

It was investigations of the weak nuclear force. But they found no was broken by the weak interaction.
force by Chinese-American evidence for it holding in interactions This had huge ramifications
physicist Chien-Shiung Wu involving the weak nuclear force. for explaining how the weak force
that provided one of the most Born in China in 1912, Wu moved to worked, and provided a first window
profound demonstrations of the the US to do a PhD in 1936. She never on other broken symmetries within
importance of broken symmetries saw her parents again: the second what became the standard model,
in particle interactions. world war and the accession of the including the “CP” symmetry
communists to power in China meant violation that might explain why
←- Wu didn’t return to her birth country matter dominates over antimatter
Page 16 explains why - until 1973, and then only as tourist. in the universe.
symmetry is important- Throwing herself into her work the
University of California, Berkeley – →-
One of the most basic symmetries home of a pioneering particle See page 46 for more on-
we know of is mirror symmetry. accelerator – she became an antimatter and CP violation-
In particle physics, this goes by the authority on beta decay and also
name of parity symmetry, a principle worked on the wartime Manhattan This breakthrough led to Lee and
that says particle processes – project to build the first nuclear bomb. Yang sharing the 1957 Nobel prize
collisions, decays – should happen In 1956, Wu designed and built for physics – while Wu got nothing.
in the same way if all the positions an experiment at the US National She went on to do much more
and orientations of the particles Bureau of Standards in Maryland seminal work, based at Colombia
LEN COLLECTION/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO

involved are flipped in the mirror. to test Lee and Yang’s idea by University in New York, becoming
In 1956, theorists Tsung-Dao looking at the directions in which a fierce critic both of gender
Lee and Yang Chen-Ning showed cooled cobalt-60 atoms trapped in discrimination in science and the
that parity symmetry was valid a magnetic field emitted beta-decay repressive policies of the Chinese
for interactions involving products. Sure enough, she found government. She died in New York
electromagnetism and the strong an asymmetry: parity symmetry City in 1997 at the age of 84.

34 | New Scientist Essential Guide | Particle Physics

Quarks are the fundamental constituents of the bulk of the matter around us in the
form of protons and neutrons. But the fiendish complexities of their interactions via
the strong nuclear force make calculating the properties of that matter from first
principles a task we are only just beginning to master.

THE
INNEGANS WAKE has a reputation
for being a difficult novel. Written
by James Joyce over 17 years, it blends
invented words with real phrases in

QUIRKS OF
grammar-defying constructions. The
final line ends mid-sentence – only
for you to realise that the words that
should come next are the ones at the

QUARKS book’s beginning. Some say it is Joyce’s

attempt at recreating a dream. Others
claim that it contains no meaning at all.
It might seem odd, then, that a nonsense word
from this most ungraspable of books should have
given its name to a building block of reality: the quark.
Quarks are as fundamental as anything can be, the
constituents of the protons and neutrons that make
up the atomic nucleus. But they are also exceedingly
weird. They come in six varieties, only two of which,
“up” and “down”, seem to have much to do with normal
matter. Their electric charge isn’t +1 or -1, but fractional
values such as +2/3 or -1/3. And they have their own
special sort of charge that comes not in the positive
or negative variety, but in so-called colours.
The origins of quarks lie in the 1950s, when more
particles were turning up than physicists knew what
to do with, barrelling towards us out of the depths of
space or summoned into existence by the first particle
colliders. It created a messy zoo of particles of different
masses, charges and sizes that seemed impossible to
corral. The insight that would resolve the chaos was
developed separately by three researchers: Murray
Gell-Mann, Yuval Ne’eman and George Zweig.
They noticed that many of these particles obeyed a
symmetry, suggesting that they were all produced by >

Chapter 2 | The standard model | 35

If we dig down deep enough, almost all matter in the universe is made
of quarks. They come in six “flavours”, only two of which (up and down)
are found in ordinary matter

Molecules Atoms Protons

u u
d

d d
u

Neutrons

different combinations of the same core ingredients. of the elements, this gave the model predictive power.
Instead of treating the particles in the zoo as When the missing particles, formed of combinations
fundamental entities, Gell-Mann and the others of all six quarks – up, down, charm, strange, bottom (or
invented a new set of particles one size smaller. With “beauty”) and top (or “truth”) – turned up as expected,
these quarks in place (Gell-Mann coined the name the quark model’s acceptance was nigh-on guaranteed.
and got most of the credit – he was the only one to win Yet much remained unclear, for example why certain
a Nobel prize for his work), the mess of particle physics combinations of quarks flourished and others didn’t.
suddenly snapped into order. You couldn’t easily produce a composite particle made
There were two basic possibilities, each of which of four or five quarks, or ever get a quark on its own.
led to composite particles with either zero or integer Why was this?
charge: you could pair two quarks (in fact, a quark and The answer lies in the property of colour charge,
an antiquark) of the same or different flavours to make which bears no relation to the colours we think of
a “meson”, or you could put three together to make in daily life. “Colour is something we’ve just picked to
a “baryon”. A proton, for example, was a baryon with name it because it comes in threes,” says Freya Blekman
the quark composition up-up-down; the neutron was at the Free University of Brussels in Belgium. Quarks of
up-down-down. Collectively, the mesons and baryons these different colours – called red, green and blue – can
together – all particles made up of quarks – came to be sit together because their colour charges cancel out, by
known as hadrons. analogy with the way different colours of light blend
“The introduction of the idea of quarks was together to make white. Through the same logic, a quark
revolutionary,” says Tara Shears at the University of and an antiquark could sit together assuming they had
Liverpool, UK. Still, at first, no one was sure whether colour charges of red and anti-red. This also explains
quarks were real particles or just a helpful organising idea. why single quarks don’t fall out of atoms in detectors:
In a 1972 lecture, Gell-Mann himself warned his audience without their colour partners, they are too unstable.
against invoking “fictitious objects in our models that “Quarks are always team players,” says Blekman.
end up turning into real monsters that devour us”. By the end of the 1970s, we finally had what is still
There were two pieces of evidence to suggest the most complete description of quarks and the strong
that quarks were more than just monsters in the nuclear force that binds them together: quantum
mathematics. First, physicists firing electrons at chromodynamics (QCD), named for the colour charge
protons noticed that some bounced off at wide angles. that quarks possess. The trouble is, QCD turns out
This suggested that the electrons had hit something to be a horrendously complex theory to deal with.
inside the proton – something like a quark. What’s Take a simple question as to the difference between
more, Gell-Mann’s model indicated that certain protons and neutrons, for example. Obviously, protons
combinations of quarks remained undiscovered. Like have a positive electrical charge, whereas neutrons
the gaps in Dmitri Mendeleev’s original periodic table are neutral, but they also have ever so slightly variant >

36 | New Scientist Essential Guide | Particle Physics

 Quarks
Up Charm Top
Approximate mass 3.9 x 10-30 kg 2.3 x 10-27 kg 3.1 x 10-25 kg

Electrical charge +⅔ u +⅔ c +⅔ t

Down Strange Bottom

8.3 x 10-30 kg 1.7 x 10-28 kg 7.5 x 10-27 kg

-⅓ d -⅓ s -⅓ b

F U N D A M E N TA L F O RC E :
THE STRONG NUCLEAR FORCE
GOVERNING THEORY: electromagnetism, and a million felt above a certain length scale.
Quantum chromodynamics (QCD) times stronger than the weak It also explains why neither
MEDIATOR: interaction. (Gravity is so weak quarks nor gluons can have
Gluons (predicted in 1962, as to be entirely irrelevant on a stand-alone existence.
discovered in 1979) these scales.) The fact that it is QCD is one of two quantum
TYPICAL RANGE: 10-15 metres insignificant on larger scales is field theories, along with quantum
the paradoxical effect of an odd electrodynamics, or QED, that
Question: when is a strong force strong-force quirk. The photon, together underlie the standard
not a strong force? Answer: when which transmits the electromagnetic model of particle physics. It remains
it is anywhere outside the atomic force, has no electrical charge, but a great hope of physicists that QCD
nucleus. Because the strong force the particles known as gluons that and QED might one day themselves
holds together quarks, the transmit the strong force do carry be united in one theory. The
fundamental particles that make the equivalent strong-force “colour electroweak and the strong forces
up the protons and neutrons of the charge”. They therefore participate are thought to have acted as one
atomic nucleus, and further holds in their own force and can interact in the incredibly hot, early first
together protons and neutrons to with themselves. moments of the universe. Finding
form atomic nuclei, it is responsible The result is that, whereas evidence of this “grand unified
for the underlying stability of matter. electromagnetism gets weaker theory” would require recreating
Its huge power is also what is when electrically charged particles those highly energetic conditions,
released in the process of nuclear are further apart, if you try and pull a task currently beyond even the
fusion in the sun, or nuclear fission quarks and the gluons that bind Large Hadron Collider, the most
in a nuclear bomb. them apart, the force between them muscular particle smasher we have.
On subatomic scales of about grows stronger and pings them back
1 femtometre, or 10−15m , it is by together. This phenomenon, known →-
far the strongest of the four as asymptotic freedom, means that Chapter 6 has more on theories-
forces, 137 times stronger than strong-force effects are never beyond the standard model-

Chapter 2 | The standard model | 37

masses: in the units that particle physicists use, the Bingo, no atoms whatsoever.
neutron weighs in at 939.6 megaelectronvolts (MeV) All of that leads to an unavoidable conclusion about
and the proton at 938.3 MeV, both around 1800 times the proton and neutron masses. “Without these
meatier than the electron. numbers, people wouldn’t exist,” says Zoltán Fodor
That difference between their masses is just 0.14 per at the University of Wuppertal, Germany.
cent, but boy does it matter. The neutrons’ extra mass Working out where they come from is another
means neutrons decay into protons via beta decay, not matter. Down quarks are slightly heavier than up
the other way around. Our current best guess is that the quarks, but don’t expect the neutron’s two down
proton’s half-life, a measure of its stability over time, is quarks versus the proton’s one to explain the neutron’s
at least 10³² years. Given that the universe only has 10¹⁰ sliver of extra mass: both quark masses are tiny. It is
or so years behind it, that is a convoluted way of saying hard to tell exactly how tiny, since quarks are never
no one has ever seen a proton decay. The persistence seen singly, but the up quark has a mass of something
of protons means they can team up with negatively like 2.2 MeV – a sliver under 4000 billion billion
charged electrons to form robust, structured, billionths of a kilogram – and the down quark maybe
electrically neutral atoms, rather than the world double that (see diagram, pages 36 to 37). That is just
being a featureless neutron gloop. a tiny fraction of the total proton or neutron mass.
The exact amount of the neutron’s excess baggage Like all fundamental particles, quarks acquire
matters, too. The simplest atom is hydrogen, which these masses through interactions with the sticky,
is a single proton plus an orbiting electron. Hydrogen all-pervasive Higgs field, the thing that makes the
was made in the big bang, before becoming fuel for Higgs boson. But explaining the mass of matter made
nuclear fusion in the first stars, which forged most of of multiple quarks clearly needs something else. The
the other chemical elements. Had the proton-neutron answer comes by scaling the sheer cliff face that is QCD.
mass difference been just a little bigger, adding more Just as electrically charged particles can bind together
neutrons to make more complex elements would by exchanging massless photons, colour-charged
have encountered energy barriers that were “difficult quarks bind together to form matter such as protons
or impossible” to overcome, says Frank Wilczek at the and neutrons by exchanging particles known as gluons.
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The universe Although gluons have no mass, they do have
would be stuck at hydrogen. energy – a lot of it. Thanks to Albert Einstein’s famous
But had the mass difference been subtly less, E = mc2 and the quantum uncertainty principle, that
hydrogen would have spontaneously changed to energy can be converted into a froth of transiently
the more inert, innocuous helium before stars could existing quarks (and their antimatter equivalents)
form – and the cosmos would have been an equally beyond the three normally said to reside in a
limp disappointment. Narrow the gap further and proton or neutron.
hydrogen atoms would have transformed via a To try to make sense of this quantum froth,
process called inverse beta decay into neutrons over the past four decades, particle theorists have
and another sort of neutral particle, the neutrino. invented and refined a technique known as lattice

38 | New Scientist Essential Guide | Particle Physics

“Simulating the workings of
quarks requires a screaming
amount of computing power”
QCD. In much the same way that meteorologists omission: the effects of electrical charge, which is
and climate scientists attempt to simulate the another source of energy, and therefore mass. All the
swirling complexities of Earth’s atmosphere by transient quarks and antiquarks inside the nucleon
reducing it to a three-dimensional grid of points spaced are electrically charged, giving them a “self-energy”
kilometres apart, lattice QCD reduces a nucleon’s that makes an additional contribution to their mass.
interior to a lattice of points in a simulated space-time Without taking into account this effect, all bets about
tens of femtometres across (1 femtometre is a quark masses are off. Talk about one compound
millionth of a millionth of a millimetre). Quarks sit at particle being more massive than another because
the vertices of this lattice, while gluons propagate along of a difference in quark masses is a “crude caricature”,
the edges. By summing up the interactions along all says Wilczek, who won a share of a Nobel prize in 2004
these edges and seeing how they evolve step-wise for his part in developing QCD.
in time, you begin to build up a picture of how the The subtle roots of the proton-neutron mass
nucleon works as a whole. difference lie in solving not just the equations of
Trouble is, even with a modest number of lattice QCD, but those of quantum electrodynamics (QED),
points – say 100 by 100 by 100 separated by one-tenth which governs electromagnetic interactions. That is a
of a femtometre – that is an awful lot of interactions, theorist’s worst nightmare. “It’s awfully difficult to have
and lattice QCD simulations require a screaming QED and QCD in the same framework,” says Fodor. The
amount of computing power. Complicating things electromagnetic self-energy can’t even be calculated
still further, because quantum physics offers no certain directly. In a limited lattice simulation, its interactions
outcomes, these simulations must be run thousands create an infinity – a mathematical effect rather like
of times to arrive at an “average” answer. To work out a never-ending reverberation inside a cathedral.
where the proton and neutron masses come from, Working around that took time, but in 2015, Fodor
Fodor and his colleagues had to harness two IBM Blue and his team eventually got there, coming up with a
Gene supercomputers and two suites of cluster- value in agreement with the measured value, although
computing processors. with an error of about 20 per cent.
In 2008, they finally arrived at a mass for both You might be forgiven for wondering what we gain
nucleons of 936 MeV, give or take 25 MeV – pretty by calculating from first principles numbers we already
much on the nose. This confirmed that the interaction knew. But quite apart from this particular number’s
energies of quarks and gluons make up the lion’s share existential interest, many physicists are looking far into
of the mass of stuff as we know it. You might feel solid, the future. Just as we invented new technologies and
but in fact you are 99 per cent gluon interaction energy. found new sources of energy by fully understanding
But the calculations were nowhere near precise the electromagnetic force, way down the line,
enough to pin down that all-important difference something similar might be possible if we can fully
between the proton and neutron masses, which was get to grips with the strong force and the workings
still 40 times smaller than the uncertainty in the result. of the particles it manipulates. Then it would be a
What’s more, the calculation suffered from a glaring case of welcome to the quark ages. ❚

Chapter 2 | The standard model | 39

CHAPTER 3

40 | New Scientist Essential Guide | Particle Physics

If you were to list the imperfections of the standard model,
pretty high up would have to be its prediction that we don’t
exist. That is down to one of the most jolting revelations
our investigations of the particle realm have brought –
the existence of the mirror world of antimatter.

Antimatter is just like matter, but with the opposite value of

electric charge and some other properties. The most existentially
salient fact, however, is that matter and antimatter don’t get
along, “annihilating” in a puff of light and energy whenever they
meet. That raises the question of how anything ever managed to
survive to make our cosmos.

Chapter 3 | Antimatter | 41
WHAT IS
HE most basic definition of an
antimatter particle is that it is the same
as a matter particle, except that it has the
opposite charge. So the familiar electron,

ANTIMATTER?
for example, with a negative charge of
-1, has an antimatter equivalent called a
positron that has a charge of +1. Similarly,
an up quark (charge +2/3) is partnered by
an up antiquark (charge -2/3).
The same goes for composite particles
Antimatter might seem esoteric, and made up of quarks: they, too, have their exact mirror
equivalent. For the proton (quark composition: up-up-
it is true that it doesn’t last very long down; charge 2/3 + 2/3 + (-1/3) = 1), there is the antiproton
in our matter-dominated world. But (quark composition: anti-up-anti-up-anti-down;
charge (-2/3) + (-2/3) + 1/3 = -1).
there are some quite productive sources So far, so simple. But a complicating factor is that
of the stuff surprisingly close to home. “charge” doesn’t just mean the familiar, everyday
electric charge. Three fundamental forces are covered
by the standard model: electromagnetism, and the
strong and weak nuclear forces. Each of these forces
has a charge associated with it, and antimatter particles
have opposite values for these charges, too.
Not every particle has an antimatter equivalent,
either. Bosons, the particles that transmit influences
within the standard model, tend to be their own
antiparticles. These include photons and the mass-
giving Higgs boson. To date, no one has been able to
establish whether neutrinos and their partner
antineutrinos are different or the same thing.

↓-
See page 49 for more on the neutrino question-
The story of the discovery of antimatter is almost as
remarkable as the fact of its existence. In the late 1920s,
physicist Paul Dirac was looking to develop a theory
that combined quantum mechanics with Albert
Einstein’s special relativity to explain how things
both very small and very fast – in this case, electrons
RAYMOND BIESINGER near the speed of light – behave. >

42 | New Scientist Essential Guide | Particle Physics

Chapter 3 | Antimatter | 43
 The equation Dirac developed had two solutions
corresponding to an electron in each of its two known
states of quantum-mechanical “spin”. But it also had
two other solutions corresponding to electrons with
seemingly negative energy – or, alternatively, with
opposite, positive charge.
At first, Dirac ignored the finding out of what he
Paul Dirac’s equation would later call “pure cowardice”. It was only four years
predicted the existence later, in 1932, that US experimentalist Carl Anderson
of antimatter found something acting exactly like a positively
charged electron in cosmic rays. The discovery of the
positron marked not only the first antimatter particle,
but the first time something never before seen in
nature was predicted first – that is, postulated to
THE STRANGE WORLD exist based on theoretical, rather than experimental,
evidence. Dirac’s discovery was guided purely by the
O F PA U L D I R A C human imagination and the power of mathematics.
Antimatter exists in our world, too, and not just in
Stories of the eccentricities of Paul Dirac cosmic rays – you just have to be very alert to spot it.
(1902 to 1984), the British physicist whose Everyday antimatter generally takes the form of
eponymous equation predicted the existence positrons produced in radioactive beta decays. They lead
of antimatter, abound. transient lives before annihilating with the first electron
Dirac was notoriously taciturn. When he first they encounter, producing energy as gamma rays.
visited the institute led by pioneer of quantum Like the occasional breaking of the most delicate
theory Niels Bohr in Copenhagen in the 1930s, of winds, we all emit the occasional positron, thanks
his reported utterances consisted almost largely to traces of radioactive potassium-40 in our
entirely of three phrases: “Yes”, “No” and tissues. A medium-sized banana produces one maybe
“I don’t mind”. every 75 minutes. A bag of Brazil nuts, or a worktop or
Later, he became more flexible. When bedrock made of granite, ups the ante considerably.
astrophysicist Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar None of this is a danger to us. The energy released
expounded his views, Dirac repeatedly by each annihilation amounts to precisely two electron
interjected with “Yes”, but explained: “When masses, or 1.022 megaelectronvolts – in the standard
I say ‘yes’, it does not mean that I agree; it units of very small energies, considerably less than
means only that you should go on.” 1 millionth of the energy of a flying mosquito.
In 1929, Dirac sailed from the US to Japan Technologies designed to propel humanity further,
with Werner Heisenberg. During the trip, such as antimatter drives or rockets, or to blow us
Heisenberg spent the evenings dancing while to kingdom come, such as antimatter bombs, aren’t
Dirac looked on, puzzled. Eventually, Dirac exactly immediate prospects, either. The total energy
asked his friend why he danced. Heisenberg of stable antimatter contained so far over decades of
replied: “Well, when there are nice girls, it is a experiments isn’t enough even to boil the water for a
pleasure to dance.” After thinking for 5 minutes, cup of tea – although you would need a vessel a couple
Dirac said: “But how do you know beforehand of hundred metres across to hold it in place.
that the girls are nice?” So what is antimatter good for? That is one of the
Whatever the answer to that question, Dirac favourite questions of Tara Shears at CERN’s Large
had a keen eye for mathematical aesthetics. Hadron Collider beauty experiment. “Antimatter is
PICTORIAL PRESS LTD/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO

When asked what led him to the equation that really esoteric, isn’t it?” she says. “You probably don’t
bears his name, he replied: “I found it beautiful.” expect antimatter to help diagnose cancer or help
Most particle physicists wouldn’t demur. with heart problems, or have any practical benefit
Regarded as the greatest British physicist at all – but it does.” Positrons make up the P in a PET
since Isaac Newton, he is honoured by a plaque scan, which stands for positron emission tomography.
in Westminster Abbey – on which stands that Here, the annihilation emissions of positrons in the
very equation. radioactive tracer you swallow can illuminate all sorts
of potential internal nasties. ❚

44 | New Scientist Essential Guide | Particle Physics

TIMELINE OF
ANTIMATTER 2001
D I S C O V E R Y O F C P V I O L AT I O N I N
P R O C E S S E S I N V O LV I N G B O T T O M Q U A R K S

1898
PHYSICIST ARTHUR SCHUSTER COINS 2008
T H E T E R M “A N T I M AT T E R ” I N T W O T H E L A R G E H A D R O N C O L L I D E R S TA R T S
W H I M S I C A L L E T T E R S T O N AT U R E U P, W I T H T H E D E D I C AT E D L H C B
S P E C U L AT I N G A B O U T N E G AT I V E M AT T E R E X P E R I M E N T L O O K I N G AT R A R E
A N T I M AT T E R P R O C E S S E S

1928
PA U L D I R A C ’ S E Q U AT I O N D E S C R I B I N G 2014
T H E E L E C T R O N I N D I C AT E S T H E THE ASACUSA EXPERIMENT OBSERVES
E X I S T E N C E O F A P O S I T I V E LY C H A R G E D A N T I H Y D R O G E N AT O M S I N A “ F I E L D - F R E E
A N T I M AT T E R E L E C T R O N : T H E P O S I T R O N R E G I O N ” N E E D E D T O M A K E A C C U R AT E
MEASUREMENTS

1932
CARL ANDERSON DISCOVERS THE 2017
P O S I T R O N I N C O S M I C R AYS T H E B A S E E X P E R I M E N T AT C E R N ’ S
A N T I M AT T E R FA C T O R Y M E A S U R E S T H E
ANTIPROTON’S MAGNETIC MOMENT TO AN
1964 ACCU R ACY O F 1.5 PARTS PER B I LLI O N ,
D I S C O V E R Y O F C P V I O L AT I O N , A N B E T TER THAN TH E EQU IVALENT PROTO N
ASYMMETRY IN PROCESSES PRODUCING M E A S U R E M E N T. T H E T W O A R E
M AT T E R A N D A N T I M AT T E R , I N CONSISTENT
P R O C E S S E S I N V O LV I N G S T R A N G E
QUARKS
2018
B O T H T H E A N T I P R O T O N D E C E L E R AT O R
1982 AND THE LHC ARE SWITCHED OFF FOR
THE LOW-ENERGY ANTIPROTON RING, UPGRADES
L E A R , C O M E S I N T O O P E R AT I O N AT C E R N
WITH TH E AI M O F MANU FACTU RI N G
ANTIHYDROGEN 2019
L H C B D I S C O V E R S C P V I O L AT I O N I N A
P R O C E S S I N V O LV I N G C H A R M Q U A R K S –
1995 THE FINAL TYPE OF PROCESS IN WHICH
L E A R M A K E S T H E F I R S T AT O M S O F CURRENT THEORIES PREDICT IT
ANTIHYDROGEN – BUT THEY ARE
TR AVELLI N G TO O FAST TO STU DY
2022
THE UPGRADED LHC AND THE NEW
2000 EXTRA LOW-ENERGY ANTIPROTON RING
C E R N ’ S A N T I M AT T E R FA C T O R Y S TA R T S ELENA ARE DUE TO COME ONLINE, AND
U P, U S I N G L E A R ’ S S U C C E S S O R , T H E W I T H T H E M T H E F I R S T A N T I M AT T E R
A N T I P R O T O N D E C E L E R AT O R GR AVIT Y E XPERI M ENTS

Chapter 3 | Antimatter | 45
 HE standard model of particle physics

THE GREAT is underpinned by the quantum field

theories that Paul Dirac and many others
developed. It depicts empty space as a
roiling quantum vacuum of particles

MATTER- and antiparticles that pop up as pairs,

and confidently predicts that the big
bang created equal quantities of matter

ANTIMATTER
and antimatter.
They would have indulged in
cyclical orgies of annihilation and recreation until
the cooling, expanding universe could no longer

IMBALANCE supply enough energy for this. At that point… not a

lot would have happened. The last matter-antimatter
pairs would have annihilated, leaving the cosmos
suffused with nothing but a lot of light and energy.
The material universe of stars and galaxies and planets
would have failed to materialise. “The fact that we are a
Antimatter becomes a big problem when world completely dominated by matter is completely
un-understood,” says Chloé Malbrunot at particle
you wind back 13.8 billion years to the big
physics lab CERN, near Geneva, Switzerland. “Theory
bang. The standard model predicts matter says we shouldn’t be here.”
That we exist to raise an eyebrow at this prediction is
and antimatter should have been produced
the only rebuke it needs. We are beings made of matter,
in equal amounts – a symmetry that must living in a material world, while antimatter is reduced
to an eternal bit-part player. One conservative solution
somehow have been broken for our matter-
is that the antimatter isn’t gone: it is just hiding, with
dominated cosmos to have come to be. far-flung regions of the universe made entirely of
antimatter. The trouble is, you would be able to see the
joins: long, thin seams of gamma-ray light produced
by the annihilation of matter and antimatter wherever
two opposing regions met. “We’ve never seen any
signal like that from anywhere,” says Marco Gersabeck
at the University of Manchester, UK, and CERN’s
Large Hadron Collider beauty (LHCb) experiment.
A phenomenon called CP symmetry gives a hint of
a plausible alternative. The idea is that, since matter
and antimatter are just mirror versions of one another,
for each type of particle there is an antiparticle with an
opposite charge; this is “C” symmetry, and parity, or “P”

46 | New Scientist Essential Guide | Particle Physics

symmetry. Put together, these make CP symmetry. today’s matter domination. It is tiny – about one part
But for some matter to have survived the early in a billion. But the CP violation we have found so far
universe, there must be some other differences doesn’t account even for a billionth of that.
between matter and antimatter. In other words, Perhaps there are unknown sources of CP violation.
CP symmetry would need to be broken. In 2017, LHCb saw an unexpected hint of the effect
The breaking of parity symmetry alone had already among heavier versions of protons and neutrons.
been established by Chien-Shiung Wu in the 1950s If the elusive particles known as neutrinos are their
(see page 34). In 1964, investigations of particles known own antiparticles, that would also allow extremely
as kaons and their antiparticles showed that perfect rare processes to supply an extra source of asymmetry
CP symmetry – and the naive picture of matter and (see the next section).
antimatter as perfect mirrors – didn’t hold. That But to expect such small, unconfirmed effects to
raised many more questions. “What makes antimatter account for the current huge mismatch seems like
different? Are some types of antimatter more different wishful thinking. Here, the antimatter problem meets a
than others, and why should this be? Are there other wider malaise in fundamental physics. “At the moment,
types of antimatter, corresponding to new types of we’re at quite a curious place because we’ve found all
matter we haven’t discovered yet?” says Tara Shears at the particles of the standard model and it looks like the
the University of Liverpool, UK, and LHCb. Answering standard model can explain everything, including CP
those questions is the key to working out why we violation,” says Gersabeck. “But at the same time, we
are here now. know it’s not right and there is other stuff out there.”
Theorists later found that CP violation among kaons Stuff like dark matter, for example, the mysterious
could be explained if three heavier, unknown particles entity that makes up most of the gravitating matter
were disrupting them. All three of these particles have in the universe. The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at
since been found – the bottom, charm and top quarks – CERN was partly conceived to make heavy dark-matter
and their presence, along with CP violation, is now a particles in its high-energy collisions. But it has found
mainstay of the standard model. diddly squat besides the Higgs boson, the mass-giving
particle discovered in 2012.
←-
Turn back to page 35 for some quark basics - →-
Chapter 5 has more on cosmic questions-
Those particles also provide new sources of CP like dark matter-
violation. In the intervening half-century, we have
measured all the main predicted sources, with LHCb The hope is, once the machine is up and running again
measuring the last, among charm quarks, just last in 2022, precise measurements of rare processes that
year. “Now, the whole thing looks completely LHCb specialises in will offer a chance to solve the
understood, and all is well,” says Gersabeck. antimatter and dark matter problems – not by
There is just one teensy problem. Patterns in the manufacturing new particles, but by measuring
cosmic microwave background, the leftover radiation their ghostly influence on already-known ones.
from the big bang, combined with calculations of the This is the physics equivalent of reaching up a
number of galaxies that must exist, tell us the early hand to have a rummage around on a shelf you can’t
matter-antimatter imbalance we need to explain actually see. “With some of these measurements, we >

Chapter 3 | Antimatter | 47
can access mass scales for hypothetical particles two atoms in 1995, but only in small quantities for very
or three orders of magnitude beyond the reach of the short times, and they jiggled about too much to do
LHC for producing them directly,” says Gersabeck. precise measurements on them. Malbrunot’s
“It’s a very, very powerful search tool to cover a huge experiment, ASACUSA, has been trying to solve these
lot of ground.” problems by making a de-excited antihydrogen beam
The hope is that these heavier particles could be that can be investigated by tickling it gently in flight
sources of CP violation, in effect repeating the trick that with laser light. The collaboration reported the first
solved the kaon problem. But there is no guarantee. tentative signs of success in 2014 – and just recently,
“We’ve got a few hints here or there of things that more certain signs. “Right now, we are about to show
might be going on, but nothing firm,” says Gersabeck. we have succeeded in forming antihydrogen in this
A few kilometres due west of LHCb, some physicists, new way,” says Malbrunot.
including Malbrunot, are betting on a different Meanwhile, Hangst’s ALPHA experiment has stolen
approach. Rather than searching for new physics a march. Its approach is to cool antihydrogen atoms
at very high energies, says Jeffrey Hangst at CERN’s to within a whisker of absolute zero and hold them in
ALPHA experiment, “we decide to look really carefully suspended animation. Its best effort is trapping more
at things we think we understand, and see if maybe than 1000 of them at once. “At every step of this, people
we’ve overlooked something.” said that this would never work,” says Hangst. “You
The aim of the experiments at the so-called would never make antihydrogen; if you made it, you
“Antimatter Factory” is to solve the antimatter mystery would never trap it. If you trapped it, you would never
by making large quantities of whole anti-atoms. All have enough. And now we have all those things, but
the differences between matter and antimatter come all that has taken about 30 years, and it’s only really
about because they have opposite charges, so the idea worked in the last three.”
is to cancel those differences by taking oppositely In 2018, the ALPHA collaboration published its
charged antimatter particles and making neutral first comparative measurement of the frequency of a
atoms out of them. An atom of antihydrogen, the “hyperfine” transition between two positron states in
simplest imaginable anti-atom, should work exactly antihydrogen, showing agreement with the hydrogen
like a conventional hydrogen atom. value to a couple of parts in a trillion. That might
If it doesn’t, nature’s most profound symmetry is sound like conclusive evidence of nothing doing, but
broken: CPT symmetry. This adds time reversal (or “T”) the hydrogen transition has been measured to 1000
symmetry to the CP mix. If particles swap charges and times better precision, meaning there is still plenty
their orientation in both space and time – if the of room for discrepancy.
universe is completely mirrored – then the laws of In 2020, the team published a measurement of
physics should work the same way. This assumption the even tinier “Lamb shift” in antihydrogen. This
lies at the heart of relativity and the quantum field effect is caused by energy fluctuations in the quantum
theories underlying the standard model. “If we find vacuum, and should be very sensitive to any signs of
any difference, that would have dramatic impacts on unknown physics. Again, there was no measurable
physics,” says Malbrunot. difference compared with hydrogen – but any
The problem is working with antiparticles, with definitive statement would require much more
their penchant for going up in smoke. To stand a sensitive measurements.
chance, the Antimatter Factory is doing the opposite In late 2018, however, the Antiproton Decelerator
of what CERN is famous for: slowing particles down. was switched off to be hooked up to a new machine,
A dedicated machine, the Antiproton Decelerator, is the Extra Low Energy Antiproton ring, or ELENA.
fed antiprotons and calms them so they can begin to Long-term, ELENA will enable antiprotons to be
create stable unions with positrons, and so form stable slowed even more, increasing by between 10 and
antihydrogen atoms. 100 times the number that experiments can play
A predecessor to the Antiproton Decelerator at CERN, with, and further increasing the accuracy with
known as LEAR, first manufactured antihydrogen which these measurements can be made. ❚

48 | New Scientist Essential Guide | Particle Physics

 TTORE MAJORANA had a talent for

MAJORANA’S enigma. The mercurial Italian’s sudden

disappearance, somewhere en route
from Palermo to Naples in the spring

MYSTERY
of 1938, still excites lively discussion.
The particles that bear his name are
no less enigmatic. Their origin lies in
a seemingly innocuous modification
Majorana made to Paul Dirac’s equation
that established the existence of
antimatter in 1928. In Dirac’s original formulation,
There is one possible source for nature’s only electrically charged particles had antiparticles.
Majorana’s tweak produced antiparticles for chargeless
antimatter imbalance that no one has quite
particles, too. Indistinguishable even by their charge,
been able to get a handle on: neutrinos. such a particle and its antiparticle would be absolutely
identical. In fact, they would be one particle embodying
Whether they could be the culprit depends on
all the qualities of both simultaneously.
many unknowns, not least a possibility raised The idea sounds faintly absurd – but it can be tested.
“If a particle is its own antiparticle, then if two of them
by a reclusive Italian physicist 90 years ago –
are brought together they can annihilate,” says theorist
that neutrinos are their own antiparticles. Frank Wilczek at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology. Majorana particles would eat themselves.
That isn’t technically unprecedented. Today’s
standard model of the workings of matter predicts
The LEGEND experiment aims that absolutely every particle has an antiparticle: the
to spot antineutrinos annihilating chargeless, massless photon, for example, is its own
one another antiparticle, and two photons annihilate themselves
on the rare occasions they interact. But the photon is a
force-carrying boson; seeing a matter-making fermion
eating itself would be another thing entirely.
So far, we have been denied the spectacle. The hottest
tip is that neutrinos might be Majorana particles in
disguise. Each of the three types of neutrino seems
to have an antineutrino equivalent that participates
in particle reactions very differently. But many
favoured routes to a unified theory of all of nature’s
forces suggest that this is an illusion. “Neutrinos
and antineutrinos might be the same thing, just
seen in different states of motion,” says Wilczek.

←-
Turn back to page 30 for some neutrino basics -
ENRICO SACCHETTI

If neutrinos are indeed their own antiparticle, their

workings might also account for the matter-antimatter
imbalance in our universe – provided also that as-yet
undiscovered heavier, “sterile” neutrinos exist. >

Chapter 3 | Antimatter | 49
 Special fibres would capture
the light from antineutrino
annihilations at LEGEND

According to an idea known as leptogenesis, in the

first microseconds after the big bang, the young, hot
universe contained extremely heavy, unstable sterile
neutrinos that soon decayed, some into leptons and
the remainder into their antimatter counterparts, but –
because the neutrinos represented an ambiguous state
that was both matter and antimatter – at unequal rates.
This neutrino CP violation need only be tiny: one part
in a billion. But it would mean that when the matter
mopped up all the antimatter, enough leptons
remained to transform into protons and neutrons
that went on to form stars, galaxies and planets.
So far, experimentalists haven’t uncovered any
convincing neutrino CP anomalies, although it may be
that we just haven’t measured with enough sensitivity
yet. But there is another test at least of whether
neutrinos are Majorana particles. If they are, we would
expect to observe a process known as neutrinoless
double beta decay that the standard model frowns
upon. In normal beta decay, a neutron changes into
a proton and emits an electron and an electron
antineutrino. Some nuclei can undergo two such
decays at once, in which case we would expect two
antineutrinos to be emitted. If these antineutrinos
are identical to neutrinos, however, they will annihilate
each other on emission, and the reaction will produce
just two protons and two electrons.
“Neutrinoless double beta decay is the smoking gun
that neutrinos are Majorana particles,” says Alan Poon
at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California.
“It would give lots of tips to theorists on how to update
the standard model, and it ties back to the very early
universe – how we got more matter than antimatter.”
Back in 2002, a Russian-German collaboration
claimed to have seen neutrinoless double beta decay,
but no other experiment has replicated their results.
More recent findings show that if neutrinoless double
beta decay exists at all, it is extremely rare – perhaps
vanishingly so. Nevertheless, so great would be the
prize of observing it that it remains the object of
ENRICO SACCHETTI

multiple research projects. In 2022, the latest,

LEGEND – Large Enriched Germanium Experiment
for Neutrinoless Decay – is starting up at the Gran
Sasso Laboratory in central Italy (see pictures). ❚

50 | New Scientist Essential Guide | Particle Physics

In all the discussions about why matter dominates antimatter in
the universe, one unanswered question could turn things on their
head – how it behaves under the influence of gravity.

The electromagnetic force is far more potent than

DOES gravity on small scales, so to measure how antimatter

responds to gravity, we need anti-atoms to be
electrically neutral. The trapped antihydrogen atoms

ANTIMATTER
that the ALPHA experiment has been able to make
since 2018 are ideal. Shortly after that breakthrough,
the team activated plans to essentially tip their
horizontal trapping apparatus at right angles to

FALL UP? function as a gravity detector, dubbed ALPHA-G.

The team should be able to test that once the
improved ELENA system for making antiprotons
comes on stream, planned for 2022. Another detector
that Malbrunot is working on, AEGIS, and a third
experiment, GBAR, are also gearing up to confirm
HEN it comes to the whether antimatter falls up or down, and also answer
question of whether the much more fiddly question of whether matter and
antimatter falls downwards antimatter feel the same strength of gravitational force.
under the influence of gravity, Any deviation from expectations would have
as matter does, or asserts its huge repercussions. Hajduković has shown how
own mirror identity by falling the existence of two opposing gravitational charges
upwards, there are strong would allow the quantum vacuum itself to become
suppositions. “A huge a source of attractive and repulsive gravitational
majority of theoretical effects. That might account for both why there seems
physicists, perhaps too huge to be a lot of gravitating stuff out there that we can’t
to be right, believes antimatter falls the same way as see – dark matter – and a mysterious force that seems
matter,” says CERN theorist Dragan Hajduković. If it to be speeding up the expansion of empty space,
turns out that it instead falls up, everything is to play which we call dark energy.
for. “It would really turn everything on its head from Black holes sucking in matter could then also
the instant of the big bang,” says Jeffrey Hangst at be white holes spewing out antimatter. Hajduković
CERN’s ALPHA experiment. says the possible new source of antimatter could
For a start, it means that anyone aiming to explain strange excesses of high-energy positrons
explain matter’s dominance in our universe through and antiprotons observed in cosmic rays, as well as
phenomena such as CP or CPT violation might be very high-energy neutrinos seen coming from our
chasing shadows. If matter and antimatter fall in galaxy’s centre by the IceCube detector in Antarctica
opposite directions, they probably also repel each other back in 2014.
gravitationally. In that case, they could have chased The existence of two opposing gravitational
each other away to opposite ends of the universe poles might even lend weight to the idea that the
before having a chance to annihilate each other. big bang wasn’t a beginning, but the latest in a series
That puts the option that antimatter is just hiding, now of cycling matter and antimatter universes.
lurking beyond the horizon of our observable universe, “Antimatter gravity experiments might be much more
back on the table. “You could potentially imagine that than a measurement of the gravitational acceleration
matter and antimatter early on have completely of antimatter,” says Hajduković. “They might
separated because of some antigravity,” says Chloé open a window towards a new physics and a new
Malbrunot at CERN. model of the universe.” ❚

Chapter 3 | Antimatter | 51
CHAPTER 4

52 | New Scientist Essential Guide | Particle Physics

Few advances in fundamental physics captured the imagination
like the discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012. It is the particle
that gives all other fundamental particles their mass, and its
existence was predicted in 1964 as part of efforts to find a
theory that would unify electromagnetism and the weak
nuclear force.

In the end, the Higgs boson was the very last particle predicted
by the standard model to be discovered. The half-century-long
quest to find it, including the construction of the largest ever
particle accelerator, CERN’s Large Hadron Collider, accounts
for part of its mystique.

But in the decade since the Higgs was discovered, it has

presented particle physicists with another, profound problem:
it works exactly as they predicted.

Chapter 4 | The Higgs boson | 53

ESSAY

HOW THE HIGGS

WAS FOUND
The discovery of the Higgs boson was the culmination of decades of work –
and took a machine of superlatives to find it, says Jon Butterworth

HAT happens if you break

matter up into smaller and
PROFILE smaller pieces? Eventually,
JON you get the component
BUTTERWORTH molecules or atoms. But
these can be further broken
down into electrons and
Jon Butterworth is a
atomic nuclei. The nuclei
physicist at University can then be torn apart to
College London and a reveal their constituent
member of the ATLAS protons and neutrons. Inside these, there are quarks.
collaboration at the Large At this point, you have reached the level we regard
Hadron Collider. He is the as fundamental within the standard model. Whatever
material you start with, at some point, you end up
author of Smashing
with a bunch of quarks and a bunch of particles like
Physics: Inside the world’s electrons. That’s it. Matter gets no smaller than this.
biggest experiment, about This neat particle pattern fits the experimental
the Higgs discovery facts, but hides a perplexing problem. All matter
particles have a property called mass – a resistance
to being moved around. This mass varies by over
11 orders of magnitude, from the lowly electron
neutrino to the relatively humongous top quark
(see diagram, pages 56 and 57). Where do these
masses come from, and why are they so different?
Within the standard model, the fermions that
make up matter interact through forces transmitted
by particles known as bosons. In the case of the
RAYMOND BIESINGER electromagnetic force, which holds atoms together >

54 | New Scientist Essential Guide | Particle Physics

Chapter 4 | The Higgs boson | 55
The Higgs boson allows other particles to have masses that are not zero
Chargeless leptons (neutrinos)
Charged leptons
Quarks
Bosons (force-carriers) The three neutrino masses are very
small
, probably much less than 2eV

Photons and gluons

have no mass
1 10 102 103 104 105

and drives the currents in our electronic devices, these as electroweak symmetry breaking, and must have
are photons. The interaction of photons with matter happened some time in the universe’s early moments.
depends on the magnitude of a fermion’s electric Whatever caused it is clearly connected to the mystery
charge: electrons (charge -1) feel the electromagnetic of mass. After all, it is the mechanism by which the
force more strongly than quarks do (charge -1/3 or +2/3). W and Z bosons acquired mass. The Higgs boson was
Chargeless neutrinos don’t feel it at all. initially postulated to explain just how this symmetry
came to be broken.
←- Broken symmetries aren’t restricted to exotic forces.
Refer to chapter 2 for more on the- An everyday example is seen when a liquid cools into
basic particles of the standard model- a solid crystal. Here, a broadly symmetrical state –
everything looks the same in all directions in a liquid –
Quarks also have a separate “colour” charge onto which is replaced by a state in which things look distinctly
particles known as gluons latch to produce the strong different along different axes.
nuclear force. This force is indeed much stronger than In the 1960s, particle theorists began to wonder
the electromagnetic force, but, peculiarly, gluons whether tools developed to describe this symmetry
themselves carry colour charge and so stick to each breaking could be applied to the cooling cosmos.
other. Consequently, quarks and gluons are never seen This was no easy task. Molecular interactions in a
roaming freely, but only ever bound inside particles solid or liquid can be defined by reference to a fixed
such as protons and neutrons – and the strong force set of coordinates, but thanks to the warpings of
never breaks out beyond subatomic scales. Albert Einstein’s general relativity, there is no such
As for the third of the standard model’s forces, standard frame of reference for the universe.
the weak nuclear force, it is weak, but without it the In 1964, theorists Robert Brout and François Englert
radioactive decay that powers the sun and other stars devised the equations of a quantum field that would
wouldn’t occur. Its weakness comes about because its pervade the cosmos and break electroweak symmetry
carriers, the W and Z bosons, have very large masses – while being consistent with relativity. Physicist Peter
almost 100 times the mass of the proton. Creating Higgs made the same proposal and pointed out that
such particles takes a lot of energy. Under normal ripples in this field would take the form of a new
conditions, matter particles prefer to interact by particle. Later that same year, Gerald Guralnik, Carl
swapping massless photons, if they can. Hagen and Tom Kibble combined these ideas into
At very high energies – in the first split-second of a more realistic theory that was a precursor to the
the universe, for example, or in collisions in powerful standard model.
particle accelerators – this difference melts away. The The central point about what came to be known as
electromagnetic and weak forces, so hugely different the Higgs field is that even the lowest-energy state of
in our everyday experience, become one unified space isn’t empty. Particles travelling through space
“electroweak” force. interact with the field to different degrees, and this
The process by which the electroweak force split creates a “sticky” quality to their movement: mass.
into the electromagnetic and weak forces is known The W and Z bosons acquire their mass by one kind

56 | New Scientist Essential Guide | Particle Physics

 V
Strange quark ~95 Me

Bottom quark 4.2 GeV

Charm quark 1.3 GeV
Down quark ~5 MeV

Top quark 173 GeV

Up quark ~2 MeV
Electron 0.5 MeV

W boson 80 GeV
Z boson 91 GeV
Muon 106 MeV

Tau 1.8 GeV

106 107 108 109 1010 1011 ELECTRONVOLT
L S (eV)

of interaction with this field, while fermions do so by kick two counter-circulating beams of protons
another. Because the Higgs field has no net electric or every time they come past, increasing their
colour charge, photons and gluons don’t interact with speed. By the time of collision, they have reached
it at all, and so remain massless. 99.999999991 per cent of the speed of light.
This was a neat trick. To find out if it was anything Bending such a fast-moving beam of particles
more, we needed to expose the field by making it requires very powerful magnets. Any power lost to
wobble, those wobbles being observed as Higgs electrical resistance would be a brake on performance,
bosons. Theoretical and experimental developments and so the magnets are made of supercooled
gave us a good idea of the energy required: the superconducting materials. Even then, they can only
Higgs boson’s mass had to be between about achieve gentle curving – hence the LHC’s vast size.
100 and 400 gigaelectronvolts. We would need On four of the octagon’s sides, more magnets
a truly huge machine. constrain the proton beams to a fraction of the
The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN near thickness of a human hair, and bring them into a
Geneva, Switzerland, is housed in a 27-kilometre-long head-on collision. Four large detectors record the
tunnel. It is commonly described as a ring, but is results, one at each point: ATLAS, CMS, LHCb and
actually more like an octagon with rounded corners. ALICE. ATLAS and CMS are all-purpose detectors,
In the straight sections, intense electromagnetic fields designed to measure whatever pops up – including
the fleeting traces of Higgs bosons.
When two protons collide at the heart of the
Measuring the momentum of photon pairs produced in LHC’s ATLAS and CMS detectors, they split into their
collisions at the Large Hadron Collider revealed a suspicious constituent quarks and gluons, which decay further
bump – one line of evidence for a new particle into myriad particles spraying out in all directions.
It is the detectors’ jobs to measure or identify these
collision products.
Each detector is made up of concentric cylinders.
Those closest to the collision point are made of a
semiconductor. If an electrically charged particle
Number of events

OBSERVED passes through the semiconductor, it liberates the

material’s loosely bound atomic electrons, creating
a pattern of electrical currents that allows a precise
measurement of the particle’s path. Magnets
EXPECTED surrounding the detector cause the paths of the
charged particles to curve, with the degree of
curvature representing the particle’s momentum.
110 120 130 140 150 The next cylinder outwards consists of detectors
Mass (gigaelectronvolts) filled with liquid argon (in ATLAS’s case) or lead
CCalculated
alculated ffrom
rom pphoton
hoton m
momenta
o tungstate crystals (at CMS). Collisions with the >

Chapter 4 | The Higgs boson | 57

densely packed atoms in these detectors stop most
particles in their tracks, and photons emitted as the
particles decelerate can be used to measure the LHC, EXTREME
particles’ energy, and so identify them.
The heavier variants of electrons, known as muons, MACHINE
aren’t stopped by these detectors, but are identified
and measured by the next cylinder of dedicated AT 27 kilometres long, the Large Hadron
detectors. The even more reclusive neutrinos aren’t Collider (LHC) is the largest machine in the
measured at all. Their presence is instead deduced world. Its most distinctive feature, though,
by totting up the momentum of all the other particles is its temperature. At 1.9 kelvin – a smidgen
produced in a collision and seeing if anything is left above absolute zero – the LHC is the coldest
unaccounted for. ring in the universe, unless an alien civilisation
A Higgs boson is short-lived, decaying almost has built one that is colder.
instantaneously into other particles. To infer its Were it not for this searing cold, the LHC
presence, we must measure these decay products might have suffered the same fate as the
and look for evidence that they came from a Higgs. Superconducting Super Collider (SSC), which
Fortunately, the standard model predicts everything was on its way to becoming the most powerful
we need to know about the Higgs boson, apart from accelerator in the world before the US
its precise mass. For every possible mass, we can government canned it in 1993. The SSC’s
predict the number of Higgs particles that the LHC partially completed 87-kilometre tunnel, near
should produce, and what they will decay into. Waxahachie, Texas, now lies derelict – killed by
For example, the Higgs should sometimes decay into a ballooning budget and a deficit of innovation.
pairs of high-energy photons. Because momentum is Keen to avoid a similar debacle, CERN, the
conserved in particle decays, the momentum of the European particle physics lab near Geneva,
photons can be translated into the mass of the particle Switzerland, took the momentous decision to
that produced them. There are many possible sources cram the LHC into an existing circular tunnel
of a photon pair, but if we concentrate on the likely 100 metres underground. This had been built
looking ones and plot their combined momentum on a in the 1980s for the Large Electron Positron
histogram, an unknown particle will make itself known collider. It was a decision that led to a carefully
as a “bump” – an excess of events corresponding to a choreographed dance of extreme engineering.
particular mass (see diagram, previous page). This is Underground rivers were frozen in mid flow,
what both ATLAS and CMS saw at a mass of around components shipped around the world and
125 gigaelectronvolts, which was announced to the superconductors pushed to their limits to deliver
world on 4 July 2012 as the Higgs boson. the magnetic power that would be needed to
It wasn’t the only evidence. The Higgs boson is also curve protons travelling at almost the speed
expected to decay into two Z bosons, which each decay of light around such a tight circular path.
further to two leptons. Combining the momentum of The cooling for the magnets requires
these leptons produced a peak at the same mass visible liquid helium at a temperature at which it is
in the photon data. W bosons added their own strand superfluid with zero viscosity that can slip
of evidence. These particles decay into neutrinos, through microscopic cracks. The first attempt
which aren’t detected, so there is no definite mass to switch on the LHC in September 2008 failed
bump in this case. Instead, we just see more W decays after nine days when a joint connecting a pair
than we would expect if the Higgs didn’t exist. All in all, of superconducting wires overheated, causing
the evidence was just enough to grab a gold-standard an explosive release of helium used as a
“5-sigma” discovery, signifying a probability of just coolant, delaying the project for over a year.
around 1 in 3.5 million that the finding came about
as a result of random statistical noise. ❚

58 | New Scientist Essential Guide | Particle Physics

For half a century, finding the Higgs boson was top of particle
physicists’ to-do lists. But a decade on from its discovery, the way
it is conforming to all expectations is increasingly causing headaches.

IS THE HIGGS
TOO DULL?
N ITS most simplified form, the standard masses suggests that some deeper structure
model comprises an equation with four terms. exists, which studying the Higgs in detail may
The first describes the three forces within the reveal. The idea is that by precisely measuring these
model: electromagnetism and the strong and interactions, we will see inconsistencies that the
weak nuclear forces. The second sketches out standard model can’t explain, offering clues towards
the elementary particles and how the forces a new, further-reaching theory.
act on them. The two final terms are only just
being written now. They largely tell the story ←-
of the Higgs boson. Turn back to page 24 for the lowdown on the-
The Higgs is connected to many of the leptons: the electron, muon and tau-
most troublesome aspects of the standard model.
It is the linchpin for the ramshackle arrangement We have already eavesdropped on some of these
of particle masses, varying according to how strongly interactions. In 2018, the LHC revealed particle
the Higgs couples to them. Electrons, for instance, processes in which the Higgs is produced along
are far lighter than their sister particles called muons, with a top quark and its antimatter equivalent, a top
which are far lighter than their siblings called tau antiquark. The top quark is the most massive
particles, and no one knows why. “It’s so chaotic,” fundamental particle, heavier than even the Higgs,
says Beate Heinemann at the University of Freiburg which means any deviations from the standard
in Germany. “The standard model has all these model should show up most prominently here.
numbers in it that we don’t understand. There are “It’s a great way to hit the Higgs hard and see if it
no laws for them. It’s like the Wild West”. does what we expect,” says Freya Blekman at the Free
Physicists hate putting numbers into theories by University of Brussels in Belgium. Unfortunately,
hand, as opposed to those numbers emerging naturally the top quark measurements revealed nothing
from a theory. “Fine-tuned” and “ad hoc” are insults in untoward. The same was true in 2020, when we caught
a field that seeks to discover the most basic order of a glimpse of the Higgs decaying into lower-mass
reality. “It’s like gravity would act differently on apples, muons for the first time.
on humans and on planets,” says Heinemann. “It’s just So far, the Higgs boson has shown itself to be
so unsatisfactory. What is the origin of these numbers?” resolutely vanilla. That is deeply frustrating. And
The only difference between electrons, muons yet the measurements at the LHC leave plenty of
and taus in the standard model is the way they interact wiggle room to think that the Higgs is hiding
with the Higgs. The mysterious origin of particle something beneath its boring facade. Indeed, >

Chapter 4 | The Higgs boson | 59

there is no shortage of ideas about what the galaxies to form – knowing how this shift happened
Higgs really is and what it really does. could tell us why there is so much more matter than
Particles we have previously considered to be antimatter in the universe.
fundamental and unsplittable have peeled open
like the layers of an onion. Atoms broke apart into ←-
protons, neutrons and electrons. Then protons and Turn back to page 46 for more on-
neutrons broke open to reveal quarks. the matter-antimatter mystery-
The same could be true of the Higgs, with smaller
constituents hidden inside it. For example, “twin The trouble is that, so far, measurements from the LHC
Higgs” or “little Higgs” models add intricate new have been unable to rule out or pinpoint these various
symmetries into the standard model as imaginative possibilities for what the Higgs is really up to. The LHC
solutions to the problem of why the Higgs has such a does “dirty physics”, says Allanach, smashing together
strangely small mass. By looking for slight deviations protons in high-energy, messy collisions to explore
in how the Higgs is expected to decay into other what’s out there. Amid this chaos, it is hard to get a
particles, we may find that another, more complex handle on the finer details of the Higgs. Most of the
Higgs lies at the core of reality. We need to “get the Higgs’ couplings to other particles have so far only
Higgs on the table, dissect it, prod it, see where it been measured to about 10 or 20 per cent precision,
starts to disagree”, says Ben Allanach, a particle depending on the particle. “It’s very easy to say
physicist at the University of Cambridge, UK. something agrees with the data when the uncertainties
Hidden in the Higgs’ interactions is also the prospect are large,” says Blekman.
of new particles. The Higgs is the only elementary All of which explains why Blekman and others are
particle whose quantum-mechanical “spin” is zero. now lobbying for a new particle collider that would
This makes it uniquely promiscuous. If you flip most produce Higgs bosons in their droves. It would produce
elementary particles on their head, they will behave millions of the particles without much “noise” to
differently because of their spin, but a spinless particle obscure our view of what they get up to, allowing us to
is the same no matter how you twist and turn it. This measure their couplings to other particles much more
means the Higgs connects very easily to other particles, precisely. Moreover, an upgraded Higgs factory that
including those waiting to be discovered. bashes together heavier – and so more energetic –
If you measure how the Higgs decays into all protons instead of electrons would allow us to
known particles, but find that some energy has gone measure the Higgs self-coupling.
missing, it would suggest the existence of novel In June 2020, CERN’s 23 member states agreed that
particles that current detectors aren’t able to see. their highest priority was to pursue the construction
As many as one in four Higgs bosons could decay of a Higgs factory that collides electrons and positrons,
into such “pink elephants”, as Heinemann calls them. the electron’s antiparticle. “Everybody agrees that we
Any such elephants would be prime candidates for need something that makes a lot of Higgs bosons,”
dark matter. says Blekman.
Yet for all the confidence that a Higgs factory is the
→- right way to expose the particle’s secrets, some
Chapter 5 examines dark matter in more detail- physicists acknowledge the prospect that the Higgs may
not be keeping anything from us after all – so a factory
At sufficiently high energies, theories predict the might find nothing. “It would be equally amazing,
Higgs boson can even decay into itself. Not only is this although difficult to deal with,” says Butterworth.
a previously unknown type of interaction, but how the Until recently, the standard model was the blueprint
Higgs does this determines our cosmic story. This “self- giving us assurance that there was something out
coupling” tells us about how the Higgs field came into there to discover. Now, with that puzzle complete and
being shortly after the big bang. Aside from giving few clues as to what comes next, we have been left
mass to particles – and so enabling planets, stars and scrambling in the dark. ❚

60 | New Scientist Essential Guide | Particle Physics

THE
HIERARCHY
PROBLEM
The very boringness of the Higgs boson’s properties leaves physicists
facing an elephant in the accelerator tunnel: if it is the standard Higgs,
how can it even be there in the first place?

O MOST of us, the mass of an eyelash the Higgs is strangely tiny. Because the Higgs sets
seems like just about nothing. But to the tone for the mass of all the fundamental particles,
a Higgs boson, it might as well weigh none of the fundamental particles – electrons, quarks,
a tonne. If the mass of the Higgs were neutrinos and so on – are anywhere near the mass they
as large as an eyelash, the world would ought to be. This fundamental headscratcher is known
look very different. The electrons as the hierarchy problem.
buzzing inside a computer’s circuits What gives? One way to avert this disaster is to set
would be as weighty as the dust coating the strength of virtual-particle fluctuations that cause
the top of it. If the dust bulked up on the the problem so they all cancel out, reining in the Higgs
same scale, each speck would have mass and making a universe more like the one we see.
roughly the mass of a well-fed elephant. The only way to do that while retaining a semblance of
This might seem like idle and rather surreal picture- theoretical dignity, says CERN theorist Guido Altarelli,
painting, were it not for the fact that the standard is to invoke a conspiracy brought about by a suitable
model suggests the Higgs boson should probably have new symmetry of nature. “But where you have a
about the mass of an eyelash. Under the rules of conspiracy, you must have conspirators.”
quantum field theory, it can temporarily shape-shift Traditionally, most physicists see those conspirators
into all sorts of other particles, acquiring their masses in hypothetical superpartner particles, or “sparticles”,
in the process. predicted by the theory of supersymmetry. The problem
These interactions should make its own mass is that the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) so far has failed
balloon from the region of 100 gigaelectronvolts – to see any of the expected evidence for these particles.
its actual measured mass – to 10¹⁹ GeV, the eyelash More recently, an alternative solution has been sought
level. This is so big that it would produce fundamental in the effects of another hypothetical particle, the
particles almost so massive and dense that they would axion, that might also solve other outstanding
create a microscopic black hole every time they problems of particle physics, such as the nature
collided. This isn’t the universe we live in. Instead, of the “dark matter” that dominates the cosmos. >

Chapter 4 | The Higgs boson | 61

 The standard-model Higgs boson has to pass many tests. It has yet to show
any deviation from the behaviours expected of it

Behaviour expected of
standard-model Higgs
a
a YES NO
W
W Does it decay to pairs
? of W and Z bosons and
Z
photons?
Z

Does it spin (measurable

from the angle at which
decay particles appear)?

Is its behaviour any

different in a mirror?

o
o Does it decay into heavy
matter particles, such as
b taus and bottom quarks?
b

Does it decay into all

standard model particles
at the expected rates?

→-
But a second fact about the new particle gives
There is more about supersymmetry on page 82- renewed pause for thought. Not only is its 125 GeV mass
vastly less than it should be, it is also about as small as
The weirdest scenario of them all, though, is if there is it can possibly be without dragging the universe into
nothing but tumbleweed between the energies in which another catastrophic transition. If it were just a few
the standard model holds firm and those of the Planck GeV lighter, the strength of the Higgs interactions
scale, where quantum field theories and Einstein’s would change in such a way that the lowest energy
gravity break down – no evidence of any new particle state of the vacuum would dip below zero. The universe
or mechanism that could rein in the Higgs mass. How could then, at some surprise moment, “tunnel” into
then would we explain the vast discrepancy between this bizarre state, again instantly changing the entire
its actual mass and that predicted by quantum theory? configuration of the particles and forces and
One solution is to just accept it: if things weren’t obliterating structures such as atoms.
that way, the masses of all the particles and their As things stand, the universe is seemingly teetering
interactions’ strengths would be very different, on the cusp of eternal stability and total ruin. “It’s an
matter as we know it wouldn’t exist and we wouldn’t interesting coincidence that we are right on the border
be here to worry about such questions. Such anthropic between these two phases,” says CERN theorist Gian
reasoning, which uses our existence to exclude certain Giudice, who set about calculating the implications of a
properties of the universe that might have been 125 GeV Higgs as soon as the first strong hints came out
possible, is often linked with the concept of a of the LHC a decade ago.
multiverse – the idea that there are innumerable Any new particle could change the game once more,
universes out there where all the other possible he stresses. “The slightest hint of new physics and my
physics goes on. To many physicists, it is a cop-out. calculation will be forgotten.” But as long as we don’t
“It looks as if it’s an excuse to give up on deeper have that hint, it remains an unsettling prospect that
explanations of the world, and we don’t want to give an oddly light Higgs could hold the seeds of the
up,” says Jon Butterworth at University College London. universe’s destruction. ❚

62 | New Scientist Essential Guide | Particle Physics

 INTERVIEW

“I HAVE ACHIEVED
NOTORIETY, NOT
IMMORTALITY”
Peter Higgs will be forever associated with the crowning achievement
of the standard model – a distinction about which he has mixed feelings.

What was your motivation for becoming

a theoretical physicist?
PROFILE The seed was probably planted when I was at school
PETER in Bristol during the second world war. One of its
HIGGS former students, whose name appeared on the
honours board, was Paul Dirac. He was about as pure
a theoretical physicist as you could get, maybe overly
pure. It was curiosity about him that began to draw me
Peter Higgs is emeritus
in – aided by my incompetence as an experimentalist
professor at the University in my student days at Kings College London.
of Edinburgh, UK, the
institution where he spent How does it feel to have achieved immortality
most of his working life and as a scientist?
came up with the particle I describe it as notoriety rather than immortality.
It continues to be an embarrassment how easily
that bears his name
I get recognised on the streets of Edinburgh going to
do my shopping. There’s always somebody who
CAGKANSAYIN/ISTOCK

wants to take a selfie or something. It’s nice, but there’s

too much of it.

Many people thought the discovery of the Higgs boson

at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider would be just the start,
yet nothing more has been discovered.
Yes, that’s rather worrying. The hope has been that
we would discover things to connect particle >

Chapter 4 | The Higgs boson | 63

 GARY DOAK/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO

physics much more with cosmology, dark Peter Higgs received

matter and that kind of thing. It doesn’t seem to a share of a Nobel prize
be happening yet. for his work in 2013

Such as theories that go beyond the standard model,

like supersymmetry? How can fundamental physics get out of
Yes, supersymmetry in particular. Quite apart its current impasse?
from its potential to explain dark matter, from a pure There are plenty of indications of the need to
theorist’s point of view, it’s hard to see how to make go beyond the standard model, but not necessarily
the connection between particle physics and gravity through the sort of thing they do at CERN. The
in any other way. discoveries in neutrino physics about neutrino
oscillations don’t fit well at all. And people are
Isn’t finding the Higgs and nothing else the very beginning to learn more about ancient galaxies
worst of outcomes? and so on, which throws some light on the question
It would still have been worse if they’d found nothing. of whether dark matter exists or whether you’ve got
The standard model is so successful in other ways that a to modify gravity. I think we have to watch the
non-discovery would have been really rather shattering. astrophysical evidence coming in.

Do you still feel a hint of embarrassment referring A lot of people would ask why we should bother trying
to the particle as the Higgs? to discover new physics. What would you say to that?
It could be worse: when it’s called the god particle, The person who answered that was Robert Wilson,
that really upsets people. That seems to me an the builder of the machine at Fermilab, when he
unfortunate mixing of theoretical physics with bad testified before US Congress in 1969. He simply said,
theology. I’ve ceased to be embarrassed about the this is one of the things that makes this country worth
particle being named after me because I’ve spent many defending. I think there’s a general tendency now for
years playing down the tendency to attach my name to people to devalue pure science and concentrate on
everything in the theory. But it’s upsetting for people the spin-offs. It’s a mistake. It’s giving in to the idea
who worked on the theory even before me to have my that pure science doesn’t really matter unless you can
name on what they did. get something tangible out of it. ❚

64 | New Scientist Essential Guide | Particle Physics

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CHAPTER 5

66 | New Scientist Essential Guide | Particle Physics

The standard model of particle physics doesn’t explain
95 per cent of the universe. The vast majority of the stuff
the cosmos contains comes in two mysterious forms:
dark matter, of which we know little other than it has
mass and interacts via gravity, and dark energy, of
which we know even less.

Then comes the problem of inflation, a period of faster-than-

light expansion that appears to have occurred in the first
instant of the big bang, but which lacks a mechanism to
make it happen.

The answers to all these mysteries would seem to lie in a

more complete understanding of particle physics – but while
the problems are easily described, convincing answers are
harder to come by.

Chapter 5 | Particle physics and the cosmos | 67

MISSING
DARK
MATTER
A coterie of cosmological measurements are E CAN’T weigh the sun or
a planet directly. Instead,
all leading us to the same conclusion: most we determine its mass
of the matter in the universe comes in some by measuring how
its gravitational pull
“dark” form that doesn’t give out light and influences the motion
isn’t covered by the standard model of particle of objects around it.
In the same way, it should
physics. As to what this mysterious matter is, be possible to measure the
we are struggling to say. mass of a galaxy, or even
a cluster of galaxies, by observing how fast stars or
other objects move around it. In 1933, astronomer
Fritz Zwicky, working at the California Institute of
Technology in Pasadena, applied this principle to the
motion of galaxies that make up the Coma cluster, a
group of over 1000 galaxies some 300 million light
years from us. He found that the individual galaxies
were zipping round far too rapidly for their gravity to
keep them bound together in a cluster. By rights, they
should have been flying off in different directions.
Zwicky’s puzzling results didn’t get much
attention until the late 1960s, when astronomer
RAYMOND BIESINGER Vera Rubin at the Carnegie Institution in >

68 | New Scientist Essential Guide | Particle Physics

Chapter 5 | Particle physics and the cosmos | 69
“Without dark matter, the
existence of galaxies would
defy the laws of physics”
Washington DC measured the Doppler shift of neutral atoms released a huge amount of energy in
clouds of hydrogen gas in several distant galaxies. the form of light, and the expansion of the universe
This showed that the speeds at which the clouds has since stretched this light to microwave wavelengths.
were orbiting the centre of their galaxies seemed This radiation today fills all of space, a relic of our
to require far more mass than could be accounted universe’s hot youth.
for by visible material. By studying the patterns of slightly hotter and colder
The discrepancy between the amount of visible patches in the CMB, we have been able to learn a great
matter and the strength of gravity is most pronounced deal about our universe’s history and composition.
in some of the very smallest galaxies, known as dwarf Among other things, these variations in the CMB tell
spheroidals. These objects contain as few as tens us how matter was distributed throughout space in the
or hundreds of thousands of stars, but produce a early universe. Because dark matter began clumping
gravitational attraction equivalent to tens of millions under the influence of gravity earlier than normal
times the mass of our sun. Even our own Milky Way matter did, its influence can be seen in numerous
galaxy generates a gravitational pull of an object of small hot and cold patches, each covering an angle
roughly 800 billion solar masses, despite containing in the sky of 0.25 degrees or so.
a total visible mass of only a couple of hundred The pattern of these spots even allows us to
million suns. determine how much dark matter must be present.
Without dark matter, the very existence of many It turns out that for every gram of stuff that we can
apparently stable galaxies would defy the laws of see in the cosmos, there must 5 grams that we can’t.
physics. The fact that they do exist remains among That doesn’t even include another, perhaps even more
the most compelling reasons to think that there mysterious, substance whose existence can be inferred
must be more to the cosmos than meets the eye. from the CMB: dark energy, a force that seems to be
Although we still can’t see the stuff itself, we see causing our universe to expand ever faster.
evidence for dark matter everywhere we look, for Even if dark matter weren’t needed to prevent
example in the radiation known as the cosmic galaxies flying apart, supercomputer simulations
microwave background (CMB), which was created suggest that the cosmos would look very different if
in the infancy of the universe. it didn’t exist. These simulations track the movement
About 380,000 years after the big bang, the of billions of particles through cosmic time, with the
temperature of the universe dropped below about aim of better understanding why the universe has
3000 degrees kelvin, making it possible for the ended up the way it has.
first time for atoms to form. The transition from When atoms in a gas of ordinary matter are
disconnected nuclei and electrons to electrically compressed, they collide more frequently. This

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NASA/JPL-CALTECH/R. HURT (SSC-CALTECH)

Without dark matter,

galaxies would defy
the laws of physics

interaction tends to push the atoms apart and so astrophysical compact halo objects”, or MACHOs.
hinders gravity from compressing the gas any more. The concentrated gravity of a MACHO would deflect
Dark matter particles, on the other hand, interact passing light on its way to us from distant stars. We do
with each other only feebly and so clump much observe such “gravitational lensing” effects, but only
more readily. Simulations that embody these often enough for MACHOs to account for at most a few
properties show that as the universe expanded per cent of the mass we don’t see. So most cosmologists
and evolved, the first structures to form would came to the conclusion that we are submerged in a sea
have been clumps, or “halos”, of dark matter. of dark matter – a gas of “weakly interacting massive
The first dark matter halos to form were probably particles”, or WIMPs – that pervades the entire volume
about as massive as Earth, but far more diffuse. Over of our galaxy, including our solar system.
time, they began to merge and became steadily larger. As their name suggests, these are relatively heavy
Eventually, some became massive enough to attract particles that, besides gravity, only interact via the
large quantities of hydrogen, helium and other weak nuclear force. The only particles we know about
conventional matter – the seeds of the first stars that are both stable, interact via the weak force and
and galaxies. don’t carry electric charge – and so do not interact with
The agreement between the shapes and sizes of light – are the elusive entities known as neutrinos.
the structures derived in dark matter simulations Might they be dark matter?
and those observed in our universe is striking (see
picture). That leaves little doubt that dark matter is ←-
not only real, but also that it formed the nurseries Turn back to page 30 for the lowdown on neutrinos-
in which galaxies such as our own Milky Way formed.
The short answer is that we don’t know what dark Unfortunately not. Neutrinos are very light and fast-
matter consists of. It must be invisible, or at least very moving, or “hot”, and so resist gravity’s efforts to clump
faint, so it can’t be made of anything that significantly them together. For galaxies and even larger structures
radiates, reflects or absorbs light. That rules out to have formed with their observed shapes and sizes,
conventional atom-based matter. Other observations dark matter particles must have been moving slowly,
provide further clues to its identity. far below the speed of light, over much of the universe’s
We once thought that dark matter might be history. Dark matter must be quite “cold”.
made up of large objects such as black holes or exotic What might this lethargic gas of invisible matter
types of faint stars – neutron stars or white dwarfs – be made of? None of the many types of particles
that are nearly invisible to our telescopes. But discovered over the past century fits the bill: not
observations seem to have ruled out these “massive electrons, quarks, muons, Z bosons or any other >

Chapter 5 | Particle physics and the cosmos | 71

known form of matter. Dark matter must be something Dark energy is everywhere – and that
completely new. Proposals for dark matter’s identity
range from heavy, neutrino-like particles – sterile means everywhere. It suffuses every
neutrinos – to ultra-light and cold species of matter corner of the cosmos, dominating
known as axions, to truly bizarre possibilities such as
particles that are moving through extra dimensions everything in it and dictating how the
of space. Many physicists have, in the past decades, universe behaves now and how it will
developed a clear favourite in particles predicted by
a class of theories that goes by the name of end. Yet we have no clue what it is.
supersymmetry. Yet particle accelerators such as
CERN’s Large Hadron Collider have consistently
failed to manufacture any of these particles.

→-
Chapter 6 has more on supersymmetry- THE DARK
ENERGY
And not just that. If dark matter really does come in
the form of a sea of WIMPs that suffuses galaxies, we
should be able to snare some naturally occurring ones
as they pass through Earth. That has been the aim of
vast experiments built up over the past two decades
and situated deep underground to shield out the
constant bombardment of known cosmic rays. The
latest iteration of these experiments – XENONnT under
MYSTERY
the Gran Sasso mountain in Italy, LUX in South Dakota
and PandaX-II in Sichuan, China – are truly enormous,
deploying anything up to tonnes of liquid xenon as
their detectors. So far, however, they have seen nothing.
It might be that dark matter interacts with other
forms of matter and energy even less than we had
imagined – perhaps only through gravity or some force
so feeble that we haven’t even discovered it yet. Such
a particle would be even more difficult to detect in
underground experiments or to produce with particle
accelerators. Or perhaps dark matter is just one of
several kinds of particles that almost never interact
with any known forms of matter and energy. This
“hidden sector” of particles would involve forces and
interactions that we have never observed, and that
allow dark matter to evolve in a rich variety of ways. ❚

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 HE discovery of dark energy came space. This would be a resurrection of the cosmological
from one of the most unexpected constant that Albert Einstein originally introduced into
results in the history of astronomy: in the equations of general relativity to make the universe
the late 1990s, two groups studying far- neither expand nor contract, but stay static, as
off supernovae discovered that these astronomers of the time assumed it did.
explosions of dying, overmassive stars Einstein later called this cosmological constant his
were consistently fainter than expected. “greatest blunder” when it became clear in the 1920s
They concluded that the intervening that the universe was actually expanding. Quantum
space through which the supernovae’s field theory supplies a possible identity for it, as it
light had travelled to get to us had suggests the vacuum of space should itself have an
stretched more than expected, making them energy. The only problem is that the theory predicts
further away than supposed – and so less bright. there must be 10¹²⁰ times more of this energy than
Dark energy is the name for whatever is causing the amount of dark energy needed to set the universe
this accelerating expansion. It dominates the cosmos, speeding on its way – perhaps the most glaring
making up, by the latest reckoning, some 68 per cent numerical mismatch in all of physics.
of everything there is. But what is it? There, physicists Maybe. Recent observations of the universe’s
are stumped, even more so than with dark matter. At expansion have shown that, when you use standard
least we know dark matter gravitates. The effect of cosmic models to extrapolate the early universe’s
dark energy seems to be to oppose gravity, whose expansion rate to the present day, the predicted value
pull would otherwise tend to make the universe falls far short of what we actually measure. One
contract – so it doesn’t seem to correspond to any explanation could be that dark energy is more
physical phenomenon we have yet encountered. complicated than we thought. “You get into all kinds of
Dark energy’s inscrutability earned it its name, exciting, glorious models,” says Heymans – ones where
but Catherine Heymans at the University of Edinburgh, dark energy evolves with time, for example, or interacts
UK, thinks it is misleading. “When most people with dark matter in mysterious ways. That might fit with
think of something as being dark, they think of it the idea that dark energy is perhaps a “quintessence”,
as absorbing light,” she says. “Dark energy doesn’t an as-yet-undiscovered fifth force of nature.
absorb or emit light.” Or maybe not – with dark energy, we just can’t tell,
Most cosmologists think dark energy is spread says Heymans. “It could be that we’ve got everything
out across the universe with equal density, like butter wrong.” A universe with a variable density of matter
perfectly smeared on a slice of toast. That would mean would expand at different rates in different places, for
more of it is created to fill new space as the universe example, possibly producing an illusion of accelerated
expands, says Heymans. “It’s a weird perpetual motion expansion. So, if we drop the cosmological principle –
machine.” That suggests a bleak future for the universe a cherished axiom that, on average, the universe is
if dark energy’s dominance continues: pushed ever the same everywhere and has no “special” places –
further apart, galaxies will eventually lose sight of we might possibly get rid of dark energy, too. The
one another, lost in uniform, dull blackness. truth is, with not much of a handle even on what the
One possible source for this sort of uniform-density nature of the dark energy problem is, we are struggling
dark energy is a vacuum energy of the sort that quantum to work out whether its solution lies in the realm of
particles might create by popping in and out of free particle physics or not. ❚

Chapter 5 | Particle physics and the cosmos | 73

WHAT CAUSED
COSMIC INFLATION?
Cosmic inflation is the best theory we HEY say it started with a big bang, but
in truth it misfired. The universe began
have to square the type of universe we as a hot speck of energy and, for an
see with a universe that began in a big instant, remained just that. Then it
blew up: from this initial seed, trillions
bang. But we are still casting around upon trillions of times smaller than an
for the trigger of this mysterious period atom, everything suddenly ballooned
into the gargantuan proportions of a
of faster-than-light expansion. Tic Tac. In a mere fraction of a second,
the universe expanded by nearly as
many orders of magnitude as it would in the
following 13.8 billion years.
As hard as it might be to swallow, this burst of
cosmological inflation, followed by a slower, tamer
expansion, is the most sensible way to iron out
wrinkles in the infant universe that otherwise would
have left today’s cosmos looking rather more lumpy
and uneven than it does. But there is something crucial
missing from the story: what did the inflating?
The most natural solution, given what we know
about how fields and forces dictate the universe’s
workings, is to postulate an “inflaton”, an energy field
with dynamite properties. But what and where is it?
We have an idea about what to look for: the
inflaton must be a scalar field. This is just a
mathematical way of describing a field that acts in all
directions, but whose strength can change over space
and time. One way to think about it is like a weather
map of air pressure. Air pressure varies depending on
the location and day of the forecast, but unlike wind
strength, say, it is directionless.
What we are searching for, then, is an invisible

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The Higgs boson might have driven cosmic inflation, when the early universe ballooned. It depends on the Higgs’s
potential curve, which describes the energy a particle or field needs to produce a certain effect

Energy

Effect

The bottom of the Higgs’s potential curve is shaped like the But if the Higgs’s potential flattens out at the sides, then when there is
base of a champagne bottle, so even when background energy more background energy, as there was during the earliest moments of the
is low, as it is nowadays, the particle sits in a position that universe, its field would be supercharged. This could have generated
means it gives other particles mass enough antigravity to drive cosmic inflation

fluid-like substance, one that suffuses all of space Unlike the inflaton, some of the Higgs field remains
and has the potential to influence everything in it. when it falls into its lowest energy state. It is precisely
Or, at least, it did. The inflaton field must have this sticky residue that manifests as the property of
generated something akin to extreme antigravity – mass for other fundamental particles. But that is in
a cosmic urge that blew up the fabric of space-time – today’s universe. As physicists Fedor Bezrukov and
but then quickly lost its impetus, to the point at which Mikhail Shaposhnikov at the Swiss Federal Institute
its influence essentially disappeared and normal of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL) realised, tweak the
expansion resumed. Higgs’s properties just a little and in the moment
In principle, there is nothing stopping us from following the big bang, it could have mustered
tracking an invisible energy field that has lain low enough force to flood the still-minuscule cosmos
for 13.8 billion years. It is what particle physicists do with inflationary gusto.
with machines such as the Large Hadron Collider: That involves fiddling with the Higgs’s “potential
they isolate a little pocket of a field, otherwise known curve” – essentially, the energy a particle needs in
as a particle, by smashing other particles together to order to have a certain effect, such as bestowing mass
generate a momentary flash of energy. We discovered on other particles. Picture this as a ball on a steep-sided
some of the most elusive fundamental particles, such hill. For most particles, when the background energy
as the quarks, in this way. But those particles aren’t is low, the ball comes to rest in the valley. The particle’s
associated with scalar fields. And in the decades location determines its effect, and right in the middle
following the proposal of inflation, our best particle of the valley, the effect is “zero”, meaning the particle
colliders failed to find anything that was – until, in is essentially switched off.
2012, the Higgs boson finally showed up. The Higgs is special, however, in that its potential
curve is shaped not like a typical valley, but like the
←- bottom of a champagne bottle, with a bump in the
Chapter 4 has all the background- middle (see diagram, above). Given that it would take
on the Higgs boson- energy to push the ball up that central bump, when
background energy is low, the Higgs comes to rest in the
You can see where this is going: might the Higgs valley to one side, where it turns “on”. This is how the
actually be the inflaton in another guise? “If the Higgs Higgs has the effect of giving mass to other particles,
gives inertia to particles,” says Juan García-Bellido at even when its field has no external energy to fuel it.
the Autonomous University of Madrid, “can it give Bezrukov and Shaposhnikov spotted that there was
inertia to the entire universe?” nothing in known Higgs behaviour to stop them from
At first glance, the two are different in a crucial way. adjusting the sides of its potential curve. What if, at >

Chapter 5 | Particle physics and the cosmos | 75

some point high up on the curve, those steep sides
flattened out somewhat? If the ball was hoisted up
there for a brief time – for example, in the highly
energetic environment of the early universe – the BEYOND
FOUR
Higgs could sit in a supercharged “on” state, where
it would flood the universe with extreme antigravity,
enough to drive apart space-time itself.
Sadly, it isn’t quite that simple. It turned out that the

FORCES
mathematical tweaking of the Higgs potential created
an imbalance in the underlying equations that could
only be remedied by the existence of a second scalar
particle. This was a surprise, but not necessarily an
unwelcome one – as García-Bellido showed, it turned
out that, bizarrely, the effects of this second scalar
field could be just the thing to explain the accelerated
expansion of the universe in recent times that goes The story of the universe told by our
by the name of dark energy. standard cosmology is a ripping yarn –
The name of the new particle, the dilaton, reflects
its close entwinement with Higgs physics. Specifically, but with implausible plot twists,
it would prevent the Higgs’s mass from “dilating” too such as dark matter, dark energy
much – useful because without it, we don’t have much
of a clue why the Higgs mass has the value it does. So and inflation, it doesn’t quite add up.
although the dilaton itself would be massless, it would For many physicists, a nifty resolution
be an influential background operator, fixing the mass
of the Higgs and, by extension, all other fundamental lies in proposing the existence of
particles. Dark energy would be its biggest footprint in further fundamental forces of nature.
the universe.
The smoking gun for an inflationary Higgs would
be a particular twist in the polarisation of the light of
the cosmic microwave background, the afterglow of
the big bang. The presence of a dilaton field would be
trickier to spot, but not impossible. García-Bellido
thinks it should have left a mark in any gravitational
waves that imprinted themselves on the background
after the tumult of inflation. Broadly speaking, that
means making precise measurements of differences
in the levels of microwaves coming from various
directions in space.
Currently, the best picture we have of the microwave
background is that recorded by the European Space
Agency’s Planck spacecraft in 2013. There wasn’t quite
enough detail for García-Bellido’s purposes, but a raft
of new instruments due in the next few years could
just make the breakthrough. ❚

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 HE simplest solution to the problems In 2015, for example, a team led by Attila Krasznahorkay
of our standard cosmology might be at the Institute for Nuclear Research at the Hungarian
just to say that gravity, the force that Academy of Sciences spotted anomalies in the decay of
determines the universe’s overarching short-lived nuclei of the unstable isotope beryllium-8.
plot lines, doesn’t work how we think These seemed to indicate the interference of an even
it does. After all, gravity is the outlier, shorter-lived, slow-moving particle a little more than
the only one of the four forces with no 30 times the mass of an electron. It looked like a force-
quantum field or particle attached to carrying boson, but one that interacts very weakly –
it and which can’t be described by the just the thing for explaining dark matter’s diffident
standard model of particle physics. interaction with the rest of the cosmos.
Instead, gravity is described by Albert Einstein’s The researchers speculated that it could be a “dark
space-and-time-warping general theory of relativity. photon”, a new particle that might transmit a force
But general relativity has proved maddeningly difficult between dark matter particles. Theorist Jonathan Feng
to edit, passing every test we have ever thrown at it, at the University of California, Irvine, reckons the team’s
including the recent detection of gravitational waves find is consistent with the existence of a “protophobic X
produced when black holes and other massive cosmic boson” that interacts over short distances with the
objects collide. Meanwhile, ideas that try to alter neutrons within the atomic nucleus in a new way.
gravity, such as modified Newtonian dynamics, or That would be a startling find, and the idea has
MOND – a popular way to explain away dark matter – its critics. Wilzcek points out that there are two kinds
don’t square with all cosmic observations. of things you can add to the standard model that
That adds to the yearning for a new character on the haven’t been observed, but would be consistent with
stage, and the belief that a fifth fundamental force of everything we have observed: very heavy particles,
nature must be waiting in the wings. “We have several which would carry a short-range force, or very light
indications,” says Philippe Brax at the Saclay Institute particles that would mediate a long-range force. The
of Theoretical Physics in France. “There’s definitely proposed new particle seems to be neither.
something there.” If confirmed, this particle would count among the
But we don’t know what new actor to expect, other great surprises that experiments occasionally throw at
than a quantum force. This tallies with the idea that theorists – a new force that interacted so weakly with
even if gravity can’t yet be described in quantum terms, ordinary matter that we just hadn’t spotted it. Brax and
most physicists believe it eventually will be, in a long- Burrage, meanwhile, are investigating the possibility of
sought-after marrying of relativity and quantum field a type of fifth force that adopts a different disguise: it
theory. “Any sensible physicist believes gravity’s force- has large effects, but those effects are screened by gravity.
carrying particle exists,” says Frank Wilczek at the It is known as a chameleon force, and the idea is that
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Follow that the particle transmitting it changes its mass depending
logic and any fifth force has to be quantum, too. on the local density of matter. Chameleon particles
The tricky part is finding a force that fits the bill. would be heavier where the average matter density is
For inflation, a one-off event some 13.8 billion years high, as it is, for example, around Earth, meaning the
ago, whatever caused it might have long since left the force associated with them would have a smaller range
stage – not that this has stopped people from coming in our neighbourhood and so would be practically
up with inventive new plot lines, even involving invisible to us. The mass of these particles would be
particles and forces we already know, as we have much smaller in the vast swathes of empty space
already seen with the Higgs and cosmic inflation. between galaxies, where they would have a larger range
When it comes to the other cosmic inexplicables, of influence – just the ticket to explain the dark-energy
dark matter and dark energy, there are also some leads. effect of distant galaxies racing away from us ever >

Chapter 5 | Particle physics and the cosmos | 77

All the fundamental forces are thought to be carried by particles called bosons. The theoretical graviton is a shadowy boson we know less well than its siblings

BOSON STATUS FORCE MASS

PHOTON DETECTED. Special cameras are capable of picking ELECTROMAGNETISM acts only on charged particles. Below 10-54 kg;
up single photons Vibrations in this force’s quantum field create believed to be
electromagnetic waves, including visible light massless

W and Z DETECTED. These particles were observed at CERN in 1983 The WEAK NUCLEAR FORCE acts on subatomic particles W: 1.4 x 10-25 kg Z:
and is responsible for radioactivity 1.6 x 10-25 kg

GLUON INFERRED. We can’t observe gluons in isolation, but we The STRONG NUCLEAR FORCE holds together quarks, the Believed to
know they exist from patterns observed in decays of other building blocks of protons and neutrons inside atoms be massless
particles in accelerators

GRAVITONS UNDETECTED. We discovered gravitational waves in 2015 Like electromagnetism, GRAVITY acts Below 10-58 kg
and believe these should manifest as gravitons in some over huge ranges. But it is felt in the same universal way
circumstances. But we have yet to see them directly by all objects, regardless of their mass or charge

faster. A chameleon force might even, under certain problems in quantum chromodynamics, the theory that
circumstances< change its strength so it assists gravity, describes the interactions within protons and neutrons.
rather than counteracting it , and so bag two birds with Called the strong CP problem, it arises because the
one stone by also addressing dark matter. strong force, which occurs inside protons or neutrons,
“It is not quite as strange as it sounds,” says Burrage, should violate the symmetry known as CP symmetry
pointing out that the massless photon undergoes a in certain situations. The fact that we haven’t seen such
similar metamorphosis when passing through a a violation with strong-force processes requires some
plasma of charged particles, experiencing a drag and explanation. Peccei and Quinn’s proposal to get around
effectively gaining mass. Wilczek agrees in principle, this was the equivalent of introducing a new field that
while being sceptical of the models themselves. “That counteracts the unseen symmetry violation. Wilczek
sort of thing is allowed by the rules of quantum field dubbed the associated particle the axion, after a brand
theory,” he says. Burrage is now testing the idea in a of washing powder, because it cleaned up the problem.
basement lab at Imperial College London, where she Over the years, it has turned out that this isn’t the
has collaborated with experimentalists to craft a only problem it might clean up, too. Axions would have
vacuum chamber with a marble-sized metal sphere many of the properties associated with dark matter, as
at its centre, designed to test for the effects of well as helping to explain some other thorny problems,
chameleon forces – albeit with no luck so far. such as why events at the subatomic level look the
But the smart money is still on a diversification of same whether they run backwards or forwards in time.
forces. With the four fundamental forces we already Configured the right way, an axion might even be able
have, we have contrived to explain only normal atomic to keep the Higgs’s mass within bounds and solve the
matter, which appears to make up only 5 per cent of the hierarchy problem. “This is the fifth force that I think
matter and energy in the universe. “It seems unlikely is most compelling,” says Wilczek.
that all the vast majority of the universe would be made
of just one or two components,” says Brax. “I wouldn’t ←-
be surprised if we find more than one new force.” Turn back to page 61 for more-
Wilczek agrees, sort of. “I wouldn’t be scandalised,” on the hierarchy problem-
he says. “I don’t know what to expect, but certainly
it would be nice to have more than one.” Indeed, All these efforts speak to a wider truth, says Brax: that
he is pursuing another candidate for an additional what we have now with our standard cosmological
fundamental force: one associated with hypothetical, model is akin to a rough draft of the script for the story
light, long-lived particles called axions. of the universe. “To embed our model in something
This particle first made its mark in 1977, when larger, something we could call a theory, usually that
Roberto Peccei and Helen Quinn at Stanford University, involves new particles or fields, and those are going to
California, were confronting one of the most irritating give you new forces,” he says. ❚

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 General relativity says gravity is not
F U N D A M E N TA L F O RC E : a quantum force, but the product of
GRAVIT Y mass warping space and time

GOVERNING THEORY: relativity doesn’t align with quantum waves in it can also be thought of
General relativity (not theory, our most successful attempt as a boson. This is the graviton.
a quantum force) at understanding reality so far. And We don’t know for sure that
MEDIATOR: the universe is expanding at an gravitons exist, but all the signs
None; gravitons if it were accelerating pace that doesn’t tally point that way. Take the discovery
found to be quantum with gravity’s attractive nature. of gravitational waves by the Laser
TYPICAL RANGE: Our existing picture may allow us Interferometer Gravitational-Wave
Thought to be infinite to predict the motion of the moon, Observatory collaboration in 2015.
but when it comes to fully This showed that the gravitational
The laws of gravity govern how explaining the wider cosmos, field can vibrate just like the
Earth orbits the sun, how an apple we are missing something. electromagnetic field. As yet, these
falls to the ground and how galaxies Quantum theory says that each waves show no trace of quantum
and the wider universe evolves. We fundamental force has its quantum behaviour, so they aren’t direct
understand these things thanks to field and one or more bosons. It evidence for gravitons. But they
the equations of general relativity, also says that the mass of a boson are a highly suggestive hint that
finalised by Albert Einstein just over is inversely proportional to the they are out there.
a century ago. Those same equations range of the force. There isn’t yet a We have some knowledge about
apply on Earth, across the solar system complete quantum theory of gravity, what gravitons ought to be like.
and beyond. Our understanding of but we do have strong evidence that Gravity exerts its influence across
THE-LIGHTWRITER/ISTOCK

gravity is one of the most impressive this force must ultimately fit into the cosmic scales just like light, so the
achievements of our species. quantum mould. That means graviton must be either massless or
But there is a problem. General space-time is a quantum field and very light – we just don’t know which.

Chapter 5 | Particle physics and the cosmos | 79

CHAPTER 6

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There are many good reasons to look for particle theories
beyond the standard model. For a start, there is its failure
to explain dark matter or dark energy, or to incorporate
gravity into its picture.

And if aesthetics is any guide, the standard model is

a kludge – an uneasy melding of two different theories,
quantum electrodynamics and quantum chromodynamics,
that is dependent on feeding in many crucial parameters,
such as the value of different particles’ masses, by hand.

Many physicists seek “grand unified theories” that

overcome this fundamental divide, but are ideally just
a way station on a much longer, harder road to a fully
unified theory that also puts gravity on a quantum footing.

Chapter 6 | Beyond the standard model | 81

DESPERATELY
SEEKING
SUPERSYMMETRY
Few ideas for a grand unified theory of N TODAY’S universe, the three forces dealt
with by the standard model have very different
quantum particles and forces have enthralled strengths and ranges. At a subatomic level,
physicists over the past decades more than the strong force is the strongest, the weak
the weakest and the electromagnetic force
supersymmetry. The theory is mathematically somewhere in between. Towards the end of
elegant and solves a panoply of problems, but the 1960s, though, physicist Steven Weinberg,
then at Harvard University, showed with
hoped-for evidence has yet to materialise. Abdus Salam and Sheldon Glashow that
this hadn’t always been the case. At the kind
of high energies prevalent in the early universe, the
weak and electromagnetic forces have one and the
same strength; in fact, they unify into one force.
The expectation was that if you extrapolated
back far enough towards the big bang, the strong
force would also succumb, and be unified with
the electromagnetic and weak force in one single
superforce (see diagram, page 84). In 1974, Weinberg
and his colleagues Helen Quinn and Howard Georgi
showed that the standard model could indeed make
that happen – but only approximately. Hailed initially
as a great success, this not-so-exact reunification soon
began to bug physicists working on “grand unified
RAYMOND BIESINGER theories” of nature’s interactions. >

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Chapter 6 | Beyond the standard model | 83
 The forces we know today have very different strengths. But if we could roll back time to the big bang or simulate its
conditions inside a particle accelerator, we’d see them becoming similar in strength and eventually become one superforce

STRONG FORCE ELECTROMAGNETIC FORCE WEAK FORCE

Holds atomic nuclei together Holds atoms together, causes magnetism Causes radioactive beta decay
Bosons: 8 gluons Boson: photon Bosons: W+, W-, Z0
Range: 10-15m Range: infinite Range: 10-18m

Electroweak reunification

Grand unified theories

Quantum gravity
LHC limit
Interaction strength (arbitrary units)

NOW 1010 1 10-10 10-20 10-30 10-40 BIG BANG

Time after big bang (seconds)

Around this time, supersymmetry made its massless entities. As the universe expanded and
appearance. It was an attempt to apply physicists’ cooled, though, this supersymmetry broke down.
favourite simplifying principle, symmetry, to the Partners and superpartners went their separate
zoo of subatomic particles. Their aim was to show ways, becoming individual particles with a
that the standard model’s fundamental division of distinctive mass all their own.
the particle domain into fermions (particles such as Supersymmetry was a bold idea, but one with
electrons, neutrinos and quarks that make up what seemingly little to commend it other than its appeal
we normally think of as matter) and bosons (the to the symmetry fetishists. Until, that is, you apply it
particles responsible for transmitting the forces of to the “hierarchy problem” – the question of why the
nature) is the result of a lost symmetry that existed mass of the Higgs boson, and by extension the masses
in the early universe. of all fundamental particles, are so strangely tiny.
According to supersymmetry, each fermion is
paired with a more massive supersymmetric boson, ←-
and each boson with a fermionic super-sibling. For The hierarchy problem is explained on page 61-
example, the electron has the selectron (a boson) as its
supersymmetric partner, while the photon is partnered It turned out that supersymmetry could tame all the
with the photino (a fermion). In essence, the particles pesky contributions from the Higgs’s interactions with
we know now are merely the runts of a litter double the elementary particles that cause its mass to run out of
size (see diagram, page 86). control. They are simply cancelled out by contributions
The key to the theory is that in the high-energy soup from their supersymmetric partners. “Supersymmetry
of the early universe, particles and their super-partners makes the cancellation very natural,” says Nathan
were indistinguishable. Each pair co-existed as single Seiberg at Princeton University.

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 That wasn’t all. In 1981, Georgi, together with Savas can find one. “It’s really reassuring that there is one idea
Dimopoulos at Stanford University, redid the force that solves these three logically independent things,”
reunification calculations that he had done with says Seiberg.
Weinberg and Quinn, but with supersymmetry added Supersymmetry’s scope doesn’t end there. As
to the mix. They found that the curves representing Seiberg and his Princeton colleague Edward Witten
the strengths of all three forces could be made to come have shown, the theory can also explain why quarks
together with stunning accuracy in the early universe. are never seen on their own, but are always corralled
“If you have two curves, it’s not surprising that they together by the strong force into larger particles, such
intersect somewhere,” says Weinberg. “But if you have as protons and neutrons. In the standard model, there
three curves that intersect at the same point, then is no mathematical indication why that should be; with
that’s not trivial.” supersymmetry, it drops out of the equations naturally.
This second strike for supersymmetry was
enough to convert many physicists into true ←-
believers. But it was when they began studying Turn back to page 35 for more on-
some of the questions raised by the new theory quarks and the strong force-
that things became really interesting.
One pressing question concerned the present-day All this seems to point to some fundamental truth
whereabouts of supersymmetric particles. Electrons, locked up within the theory. “When something has
photons and the like are all around us, but there is no applications beyond those that you designed it for,
sign of selectrons and photinos, either in nature or in then you say, ‘well this looks deep’,” says Seiberg. “The
any high-energy accelerator experiments so far. If such beauty of supersymmetry is really overwhelming.”
particles exist, they must be extremely massive indeed, Sadly, neither mathematical beauty nor promise
requiring huge amounts of energy to fabricate. are enough on their own. You also need experimental
Such huge particles would long since have decayed evidence. “It is embarrassing,” says Michael Dine at
into a residue of the lightest, stable supersymmetric the University of California, Santa Cruz. “It is a lot of
particles, dubbed neutralinos. Still massive, the paper expended on something that is holding on by
neutralino has no electric charge and interacts with these threads.”
normal matter extremely timorously by means of The best proof would come if we could produce
the weak nuclear force. No surprise, then, that it is neutralinos directly through collisions in an
has eluded detection so far. accelerator. The trouble is that we aren’t entirely sure
When physicists calculated exactly how much of how muscular that accelerator would need to be. The
the neutralino residue there should be, they were mass of the superpartners depends on precisely when
taken aback. It was a huge amount – far more than supersymmetry broke apart as the universe cooled and
all the normal matter in the universe. the standard particles and their superpartners parted
Sound familiar? Yes, indeed: it seemed that company. Various versions of the theory haven’t
neutralinos fulfilled all the requirements for come up with a consistent timing. Some variants even
the dark matter that astronomical observations suggest that certain superpartners are light enough to
persuade us must dominate the cosmos. A third have already turned up in accelerators such as the Large
strike for supersymmetry. Electron-Positron collider – the Large Hadron Collider
Each of the three questions that supersymmetry (LHC)’s predecessor at CERN – or the Tevatron collider
purports to solve – the hierarchy problem, the in Illinois. Yet neither accelerator found anything.
reunification problem and the dark-matter problem – And nor has the LHC. That is despite the confident
might have its own unique answer. But physicists are predictions both that the kind of supersymmetry
always inclined to favour an all-purpose theory if they that best solves the hierarchy problem will become >

Chapter 6 | Beyond the standard model | 85

Particles are divided into two families called bosons and fermions. Among them are groups known as leptons, quarks and force-carrying
particles like the photon. Supersymmetry doubles the number of particles, giving each fermion a massive boson as a super-partner and vice
versa. The LHC is expected to find the first supersymmetric particle

LEPTONS QUARKS
electron, muon, tau, up, down,
electron neutrino, charm, strange, GLUINO PHOTINO WINO ZINO HIGGSINO
muon neutrino, bottom, top
FERMIONS tau neutrino

SLEPTONS SQUARKS GLUON PHOTON W± Z0 HIGGS

BOSONS selectron, smuon,
stau, electron sneutrino,
sup, sdown,
scharm, sstrange,
muon sneutrino, sbottom, stop The lightest supersymmetric particle is
tau sneutrino
called the neutralino. It could be any one Standard model
of the -inos, or a combination of them

visible at the energies the LHC explores, and that exist at energies that particle colliders could ever reach.
if neutralinos have the right mass to make up dark “One of the things we’ve learned is that the standard
matter, they should be produced in great numbers model could be valid all the way up to very high-energy
at the LHC. scales,” says Keith Ellis, a theorist at Durham University,
Finding the Higgs boson and nothing else at the UK. “It’s a depressing prospect.” Ultimately, nature may
LHC was dubbed the “nightmare scenario” by theorists not be as elegant as physicists hope, and some parts
at CERN before the event. But with the failure of the may be unknowable – no matter how powerful or
LHC to find a bevy of new particles, the most plausible precise your particle collider.
supersymmetry theories have crumbled. The only way Ben Allanach, a particle physicist at the University
to resolve the small measured Higgs mass is to plug in of Cambridge, remains hopeful. He has shifted his
by hand a starting value for the “bare mass” Higgs, approach from top-down theories that begin with
meaning the mass before you take into account all grand aesthetic principles to what he calls “bottom-up”
the interactions with virtual particles around it, which thinking. It starts from small cracks in the standard
just so happens to cancel out those interactions. “It’s model – such as particles that decay too quickly or are
too suspiciously fine-tuned to be a coincidence,” says more magnetic than you might expect – and builds
Butterworth. Supersymmetry isn’t quite dead yet, theories piece by piece. If adding a new particle
but the space in which it can live and breathe has explains the data better, then it is worth considering,
narrowed considerably. regardless of how aesthetically appealing it is.
Supersymmetry is rooted in an idea called A “Higgs factory” to make large quantities of Higgs
naturalness, in which the laws governing the universe bosons and measure their decays precisely will allow us
are elegant and explicable, as opposed to makeshift to examine these small cracks, says Allanach. While not
and arbitrary. Throughout history, when numbers as exciting as discovering new particles, measuring the
have popped up that seemed fine-tuned, physicists Higgs precisely is “not to be sniffed at”, he says. It offers
have suspected that something was missing from a bedrock of vital data for new ideas to leap from.
their theory – and usually they were right. That is “In my heart, I feel there will be a paradigm like the
why the continued absence of new particles at the standard model which will come out of everything,
LHC is a “sobering moment”, says Nathaniel Craig at and we will be able to understand it. Of course I do,”
the University of California, Santa Barbara. “There is says Allanach. “But we need a change of approach.
now a great reluctance to use aesthetic criteria.” I do worry that we’ve got too locked into doing what
With naturalness under question, it is hard to know the theorists tell us and lost sight of the fact that
whether new particles beyond the standard model we’re actually exploring unknown territory.” ❚

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ESSAY

IS STRING
THEORY THE
ANSWER?
NE of the earliest attempts at unifying
Postulating curled-up extra dimensions remains the forces of nature was made in the
perhaps the most promising route to a theory 1920s, when physicist Theodor Kaluza
melded Albert Einstein’s gravitational
of all the forces of nature that we have – but theory with the electromagnetic
evidence is still lacking, says Michael Duff. theory of James Clerk Maxwell.
The universe we live in appears
to have four dimensions. Space has
three – right-left, forwards-backwards
and up-down – and the fourth is time.
Kaluza rewrote Einstein’s theory as if there were five
space-time dimensions. This gives the gravitational
PROFILE field some extra components that he thought could
be interpreted as Maxwell’s electromagnetic field.
MICHAEL Amazingly, he showed that these extra components
DUFF precisely matched Maxwell’s equations.
Electromagnetism comes for free if you are
Michael Duff is emeritus willing to buy a fifth dimension for gravity.
professor at Imperial Why can’t we see a fifth dimension? In 1926,
physicist Oskar Klein came up with an answer.
College London and editor
He supposed that the fifth dimension isn’t like
of The World in Eleven the other four, but is instead curled up into a circle
Dimensions: Supergravity, that is too small to see.
supermembranes and To see how this works, consider a simpler analogy:
M-theory an ant on a tightrope. As well as walking along the
tightrope, the ant can choose to walk around its
circumference at any point. Only the ant is aware
of the additional circular dimension. Viewed from a
distance much, much larger than the ant’s size, the rope
looks very different: it is essentially a one-dimensional
line and the extra dimension is hidden. >

Chapter 6 | Beyond the standard model | 87

 This is how Klein envisaged Kaluza’s five- For these reasons, attention turned to a rival approach
dimensional universe and his calculations even called superstring theory.
showed how small the extra dimension should be In superstring theory, the fundamental building
curled up. At 10-³⁵ metres across, the fifth dimension blocks of matter aren’t point-like particles. Instead,
is too small to probe even with the most powerful they are one-dimensional strings that live in a universe
particle accelerators, which act as windows into the with 10 space-time dimensions. Just like violin
subatomic realm. Hence we have the impression strings, they can vibrate in various modes, each one
that we live in a four-dimensional world. representing a different elementary particle. Certain
Kaluza and Klein’s idea lay dormant for many string vibrations can even describe gravitons, the
years. In some ways, it was ahead of its time, partly hypothetical carriers of the gravitational force.
because we knew so little about the weak and strong To begin with, superstring theory looked like a
forces. It was revived by the rise to prominence of theorist’s dream. The six extra dimensions could
supersymmetry starting in the 1970s, which, as we be curled up in such a way as to avoid the problems
have seen, offered an attractive way to solve many with the weak force encountered by 11-dimensional
of the standard model’s problems. supergravity. Also, superstring theory looked just like
One reason why theorists are so enamoured with general relativity when the graviton energy was set
supersymmetry is often overlooked: it predicts gravity. sufficiently small. But the most important feature
According to the mathematics of supersymmetry, the was that the infinities and anomalies that had
act of turning an electron or similar particle into its plagued previous attempts to apply quantum
supersymmetric partner and back again is identical field theory to general relativity no longer existed.
to moving it through space-time. Here, for the first time, was a consistent way to unify
This means supersymmetry offers a connection gravity with quantum mechanics. Theorists went wild.
between the properties of quantum particles and space- But after the initial euphoria, doubts began to creep in.
time, making it possible to incorporate gravity, too. The Superstring theory had some serious shortcomings.
resulting theory that incorporates the gravitational One problem is that there is not one, but five,
force and supersymmetry is known as supergravity. mathematically consistent superstring theories,
The mathematics of supergravity has an unexpected each competing for the title of the theory of
consequence: space-time can have no more than everything. We faced an embarrassment of riches.
11 dimensions. In the early 1980s, this prompted a A second puzzle soon became apparent, too.
revival of the Kaluza-Klein idea, with up to seven Supersymmetry says that the universe has a maximum
curled-up dimensions. Could these extra dimensions of 11 dimensions, yet the mathematics of superstring
describe the strong, weak and electromagnetic forces? theory states there should be 10. What gives? And there
At first, supergravity looked extremely promising, was a related question: why stop at one-dimensional
but problems crept in. For a start, 11-dimensional strings? Why not two-dimensional membranes that
supergravity has trouble describing how quarks and might take the form of a sheet or the surface of a bubble?
electrons interact with the weak nuclear force. Even It turns out that supersymmetry and membranes do
more serious is a problem that has dogged all other go together. Just as superstrings live in 10 dimensions,
attempts to reconcile gravity and quantum field it was calculated in 1987 that “supermembranes”
theory: when you use supergravity’s equations to can live in an 11-dimensional space-time dictated
calculate certain quantum-mechanical processes, by supergravity.
the answer is infinity. This makes no sense and is Moreover, if the 11th dimension is curled up, as
a sure sign that supergravity is, at best, only an Kaluza and Klein’s early work suggested it could be,
approximation to a viable theory of everything. then it is possible to wrap the membrane around it.

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If curled up tightly enough, this wrapped membrane surface correspond precisely to how membranes
would look like a string in 10 dimensions. interact on the interior. When two mathematical
Despite these attempts to revive 11 dimensions approaches describe the same physics in this way,
with the new ingredient of membranes, most string we call it a duality.
theorists remained sceptical. For many years, there This duality is remarkable because the world on the
were two camps: string theorists with their surface of the universe looks so different to the world
10-dimensional theory, and the membrane theorists inside. If Maldacena’s idea is applied to our universe, it
working in 11 dimensions. It wasn’t clear whether could mean that we are just shadows on the boundary
they were on the same page or not. of a higher-dimensional universe.
All the work on strings, membranes and Maldacena’s paper has been cited many thousands
11 dimensions was brought together in 1995 by of times. This is partly because his idea has found
Edward Witten, the string-theory guru at the Institute applications in unexpected areas of physics, including
for Advance Study in Princeton, under one umbrella superconductivity and fluid mechanics, regardless of
called M-theory. M, he says, stands for magic, mystery whether M-theory is the theory of everything or not.
or membrane according to taste. The geometrical and topological properties of the
Witten showed that the five different string theories curled-up extra dimensions dictate the appearance
and 11-D supergravity weren’t rival theories at all. They of our four-dimensional world, including how many
were merely different facets of M-theory. Having one generations of quarks and leptons there are, which
unique theory was a huge step forward. It also turned forces exist and the masses of the elementary particles.
out that M-theory and its membranes were able to do A puzzling feature of M-theory is that there are many
things strings alone couldn’t. (possibly infinitely many) ways of curling up these
Take black holes, for example, which are excellent dimensions, leading to a “multiverse” – a number
laboratories for testing our theories. In 1974, Stephen of different universes. Some may look like ours,
Hawking showed that black holes aren’t entirely black – with three generations of quarks and leptons and
instead, they can radiate energy due to quantum four forces; many won’t. But from a theoretical point
effects. This means that black holes have temperature of view, they all seem plausible.
and another thermodynamic property called entropy, The traditional view is that there is one universe
which is a measure of how disorganised a system is. and a unique set of fundamental laws. The alternative
Hawking showed that a black hole’s entropy depends view, which is gaining credibility, says that there are
on its area. Yet it should also be possible to work out its multiple universes out there with different laws of
entropy by accounting for all the quantum states of the physics, and one of these universes just happens to be
particles making up a black hole. However, all attempts the one we are living in. Each of these universes must
to describe a black hole in this way had failed – until be taken seriously.
M-theory came along. Amazingly, M-theory exactly So is M-theory the final theory of everything?
reproduces Hawking’s entropy formula. This success In common with rival attempts, falsifiable predictions
gave us confidence that we were on the right track. are hard to come by. Some generic features, such as
In 1998, Juan Maldacena, also at the Institute for supersymmetry or extra dimensions, might show
Advanced Study, used membranes to explore what up at collider experiments or in astrophysical
would happen inside a hypothetical universe with observations, but the variety of possibilities offered
many dimensions of space and gravity. He showed by the multiverse makes precise predictions difficult.
that everything happening on the boundary of such a Are all the laws of nature we observe derivable from
universe is equivalent to everything happening inside fundamental theory? Or are some mere accidents?
it: ordinary particles interacting on the boundary’s The jury is still out. ❚

Chapter 6 | Beyond the standard model | 89

 HUNTING THE
MAGNETIC MONOPOLE
A monopole is a magnetic north pole without AGNETIC monopoles’ no-show
has long been a bugbear to the
its accompanying south, or a south without its sort of physicist that sees truth
north. If our present understanding of particles in the beauty of mathematical
formulae. The idea of monopoles
and forces is correct, we don’t have the arises in the four equations
remotest chance of snaring one – which collated by James Clerk Maxwell
in the 1860s to describe
is all the more reason to look for them. electromagnetism. Maxwell’s
equations predicted the existence
of individual, freely moving electric charges – things
nature supplies in abundance in the form of particles
such as electrons and protons. To achieve an
aesthetically pleasing symmetry in the equations,
similar freewheeling magnetic charges had to exist, too.
This was less obvious. North and south magnetic
poles that attract and repel each other do exist, just
as positive and negative electric charges do. But from
the humblest bar magnet to Earth’s mighty interior
Things acting like monopoles dynamo, magnetic poles only ever crop up tied
have been found in together in pairs. Chop a magnet in half and, like Walt
supercooled materials Disney’s sorcerer’s apprentice with his magic broom,
you forge two new complete magnets, each with a
north and south pole. Faced with a brute fact of nature,
Maxwell eschewed beauty and wrote the freely moving
monopole out of his equations – and out of history.
Monopoles made a comeback thanks to Paul Dirac,
who was notoriously obsessed with mathematical
beauty. By applying quantum theory to Maxwell’s
classical electromagnetism, he showed that even if there
was just one magnetic monopole in the entire universe,
its existence would explain why all the electric charge
we see comes in the same bite-sized chunks of +1 or -1.
SCIENCE HISTORY IMAGES/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO

This time, the idea stuck. Forty years on,

physicists discovered that the electromagnetic force
and the weak nuclear force that controls radioactive
decay could be rolled into one, and were seeking ways
to unify this force with a third, the strong nuclear force.
Gerard ‘t Hooft and Alexander Polyakov independently
showed that monopoles were essential if such a
“grand unified theory” were to make predictions in
accordance with reality.

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 “Without monopoles, you would have to expect
electrically charged particles to have all sorts of
charges,” says ‘t Hooft, who is at Utrecht University
in the Netherlands and won a share of the 1999 Nobel
prize in physics for his work on unifying weak and
electromagnetic interactions.
Fellow theorist Joseph Polchinski at the University
of California, Santa Barbara, also has no doubt about
the reality of monopoles. “Of all the new things we
have predicted – supersymmetry, strings and so on –
I would still put the very highest confidence in
monopoles,” he says.
So where are they? Researchers have looked for
monopoles everywhere, from Antarctic ice to moon
THE LURE OF
rocks. Things acting like monopoles have even been
created in various supercooled materials in the lab.
The closest we have come to the real thing was on
Valentine’s night in 1982. That was when physicist Blas
ANOMALIES
Cabrera saw a promising event in a monopole detector
he had set up in a basement at Stanford University in The LHC has failed so far to find evidence
California. It proved to be a one-night stand, prompting
some wag to post Cabrera this loving note exactly a
of the bevy of particles associated with a
year later: “Roses are red/Violets are blue/The time theory like supersymmetry. But just recently,
has now come/For monopole two.”
These days, Cabrera’s monopole and a couple of
both there and elsewhere, signs have been
other even more ambiguous sightings are regarded as emerging of deviations from standard model
experimental blips. But Dirac’s calculations provide a
ready-made excuse for the monopole’s absence. They
predictions, with particles decaying at
show that the smaller the unit of electric charge is, the anomalous rates and a discrepancy in the
larger the unit of magnetic charge must be. Because
the basic electric charge is incredibly small – you need
measured mass of the W boson. But do
around 1000 billion electrons to power a hearing aid they amount to anything?
for just 1 second – the basic magnetic charge is so large
that it would take an implausible amount of energy to
make a particle carrying it.
Precisely how much energy depends on the variant of T HALF past six on the evening of
force unification that you choose – theorists have come 20 January 2021, amid the gloom of
up with several ways of performing this feat over the a long winter lockdown, a small team
years. If you follow the variant that underlies our current met on Zoom to share a moment they
best theory of particles and forces, the standard model, knew might change physics forever.
then the only time that enough energy was around to “I was literally shaking,” says Mitesh
make monopoles in any abundance was in the first Patel at Imperial College London. He
infinitesimal fraction of a second after the big bang. and his team were about to “unblind”
About the same time, cosmic inflation is thought to have a long-awaited measurement from
occurred, which would have scattered monopoles to the CERN’s LHCb experiment.
four winds. “Quite plausibly what was an overabundance The measurement concerns bottom (also known
of monopoles would be diluted to one in the entire as “beauty”) quarks, whose behaviour has long hinted
volume of the visible universe,” says Polchinski. at forces beyond our established understanding. That
Which is one neat way to excuse the continuing lack saga began in the mid-2000s when Gudrun Hiller, a
of experiments looking for monopoles, most recently theoretical physicist then at the University of Munich,
at the Large Hadron Collider, to find them. ❚ Germany, was panning for insights in a flood of data >

Chapter 6 | Beyond the standard model | 91

“Many physicists
believe the ‘B anomalies’
are the real deal”
from the Belle experiment in Japan and the BaBar Enter LHCb, one of four large particle detectors
experiment in California. These “B-factories” produced on CERN’s 27-kilometre Large Hadron Collider ring
bottom quarks by colliding electrons with their beneath the French-Swiss border. Early measurements
antiparticles, positrons. The bottom quarks would suggested that decays producing a strange quark and
live for an instant – around 1.5 trillionths of a second, two muons happened less often than the standard
on average – before decaying into other particles. model predicted, and the particles flew out at odd
Hiller was particularly interested in an extremely angles, albeit still within the range of the theoretical
rare decay where a bottom quark transforms into a uncertainty. But in 2014, LHCb released the first
strange quark, the third heaviest of six types of quark. measurement comparing how often bottom quarks
In doing so, it emits two oppositely charged muons. decayed into muons and electrons. To almost
Rare decays such as these are very valuable, as they everyone’s surprise, the data once more disagreed
could be strongly influenced by unknown forces of with the standard model. Bottom quarks appeared
nature, should they exist. The trouble was, theoretical to be decaying to muons less often than to electrons.
predictions of how often a bottom quark should Analysis concluded there was less than a 1 per cent
transform into a strange quark and two muons chance the deviation was purely down to some random
were plagued by uncertainties from quantum statistical wobble in the data. This was still a long way
chromodynamics, or QCD, the theory of the strong short of the gold-standard statistical significance
force that governs how quarks interact. This made required to declare a discovery in particle physics,
it very hard to make any meaningful comparison which corresponds to a 1 in 3.5 million chance of the
with experimental measurements – any discrepancy result being a fluke.
could be down to the imprecision of the predictions. When the Hiller-Krüger ratio was updated with
more data in 2019, the measured value moved towards
←- the standard model value. “We really thought we had
Page 35 has more on quarks and QCD- it,” says Patel, who led the work. “We ended up feeling
gutted.” So, when Patel and his colleagues met on
←- Zoom in January 2021 to unveil a new measurement,
Page 76 has more on the search for fifth forces- emotions were running high. It showed that the
measured value of the ratio had stayed almost
Undeterred, she and her collaborator Frank Krüger exactly the same, but the error on it had shrunk,
realised that if you look at how often this decay creating an unmistakable tension with the standard
occurred compared with a similar decay that spits model prediction.
out electrons instead, the nasty uncertainties from Anomalies come and go in particle physics, and no
QCD cancelled out. The ratio of the two decays could measurement of the muon-electron ratio on its own
be predicted very precisely – but would be sensitive has yet crossed the threshold of statistical certainty
only to forces pulling on the electrons and muons for it to be regarded as a definitive discovery. But there
with differing strength. is a coherency to what have become known as the

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“B anomalies” that has led a growing number symmetry then breaks down into the usual three-
of physicists to regard this as the real deal. “I’ve colour strong force with red, green and blue quarks,
turned into a believer,” says Ben Allanach, a theorist while the leftover fourth colour is carried by the leptons.
at the University of Cambridge. Leptons are really just differently coloured quarks.
For him, the most promising explanation is a force This is heady stuff – but the challenge now is to
carried by a hypothetical particle known as a Z prime. prove that these anomalies are the real deal. We have
This would be very heavy, electrically neutral and, been disappointed before. In 2016, huge excitement
crucially, would interact with electrons and muons was generated by an anomaly discovered by the two
with different strengths. This could also explain one LHC experiments that discovered the Higgs boson,
of the most mysterious, seemingly arbitrary features ATLAS and CMS, simultaneously. It seemed to
of the standard model: the fact that matter particles indicate the existence of a particle weighing in at
come in three “generations” of wildly varying masses. 750 gigaelectronvolts, six times the mass of the Higgs –
but as more data came in, the anomaly melted away
←- again. Although a series of unfortunate statistical
Page 24 explains the three generations- flukes now seems like a very unlikely explanation
given the range of different anomalies seen with
The different generations could be explained if the beauty quarks, the looming spectre is the chance
bottom quark anomalies are revealing the presence of a conspiracy of missed biases, either in the
of a new force that acts almost exclusively on the theoretical predictions or the experimental
third, heaviest generation of particles. “The model measurements, or perhaps both.
I’m working on contains a symmetry which means And the thing is, it isn’t the only anomaly. There
that if you squint a bit, only the third generation is is the discrepancy in measurements of the muon
allowed to have a mass,” says Allanach – which would magnetic moment by the Muon g-2 experiment at
explain why these particles are so heavy. Fermilab in Illinois. What’s more, early in 2022, another
The B anomalies appear to be resurrecting aspects Fermilab collaboration announced a measurement
of grand unified theories that aim to marry the three of the mass of the W boson, which transmits the weak
forces of nature described by the standard model – the nuclear force, significantly at odds with the standard
strong and weak forces and electromagnetism – but at model prediction.
far lower energies than anyone had expected. “What The predicted value is 80.379 GeV, but the new
we’re doing is putting in a tiny bit of symmetry – it’s measurement – the most precise so far – puts it at
an element of a grand unified theory, but it’s only a 80.4335 GeV. That might not sound like a big difference,
little one,” says Allanach. But he believes it could be but it amounts to a discrepancy with a statistical
a glimpse of the edge of something much grander. significance of 7 sigma, way above the 5-sigma “gold
Hiller pioneered an alternative explanation for the standard”. This corresponds to around a 1 in 780 billion
B anomalies that goes further still – a particle known probability of seeing such a result by chance.
as a leptoquark. Again, a leptoquark would be the “If the W boson mass is deviating that much from the
carrier of a new force. This force would transform standard model expectation, and if we understand all
quarks directly into leptons (that is, electrons, muons the [systematic] uncertainties, then it’s a huge deal,”
and taus), hence the particle’s name. Unlike Z prime says Ulrik Egede at Monash University in Australia.
models, leptoquark models also aim to explain a The “if” is the important point for many physicists
second set of anomalies that have appeared in another who, while excited at the result, are cautious about its
type of bottom quark decay, this time to charm quarks, divergence from previous measurements, including
while pointing to a unified theory that is much closer those made at the LHC. Experiments there are now
at hand in terms of energy scales. redoubling their efforts to produce still more precise
They do this by differing from the standard model results in the hope of pinning down the anomaly, while
in a crucial way. In the standard model, the equivalent theorists compete to produce explanations – among
of electric charge for the strong force, which acts on them, that it is explained by the Higgs boson finally
quarks, is colour charge, which comes in three varieties, doing something unexpected.
red, green and blue. Leptons don’t carry colour, so they If some or all of these anomalies prove to be real,
don’t feel the strong force. In leptoquark models, the challenge then becomes to say how, if at all, they
however, there is a fourth colour, sometimes labelled fit together. But the fact they are out there is giving
violet, which arises from an enlarged version of the physicists new wind to explore a world beyond the
symmetry that describes the strong force. This larger standard model. ❚

Chapter 6 | Beyond the standard model | 93

 INTERVIEW

“THE WORLD NEEDS

PLACES LIKE CERN”
Particle physics may be waiting for Are you happy with what the Large Hadron Collider has
achieved so far?
its next big breakthrough, but that is Of course, we are extremely happy. The discovery of
no reason to give up on the enterprise, the Higgs boson was a monumental one because this
particle is very special, very different from the other
says Fabiola Gianotti. 16 elementary particles that we had discovered and
measured before.
The Higgs is related to the most obscure and
problematic sector of the standard model, the
theory that describes the elementary particles
and their interactions. And it is a unique tool to
look for physics beyond the standard model that
PROFILE could help us elucidate other mysteries.

FABIOLA But the LHC hasn’t discovered anything new and unexpected.
GIANOTTI The precise measurement of the Higgs boson and
many other well-known particles has allowed us
Fabiola Gianotti is a to make a step forward in our understanding of
particle physicist who, fundamental physics. We didn’t discover new
physics, true.
as leader of the ATLAS
This may appear disappointing, because of course
experiment, announced discovering new particles is always very glamorous
the discovery of the and exciting. But being able to disprove some scenarios
Higgs boson to the world and hypotheses is important to help us guide our
in 2012. Since 2016, she explorations towards the most promising directions.
has been the director-
general of CERN Hasn’t the no-show of new particles broken the successful
model of particle physics over the past few decades: theorists
propose new particles and experimentalists find them?
It hasn’t always been like that in the history of particle
physics. There have been times when theory has guided

94 | New Scientist Essential Guide | Particle Physics

REUTERS/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO

Fabiola Gianotti’s team discovered

the Higgs boson, but the job hasn’t
ended there

experiments, and there have been times when the Dark matter could be either extremely light or
experiments were discovering plenty of new particles extremely heavy. The window that we have explored
and theory was trying to make sense of them. Now, so far might not be large enough, or dark matter
perhaps more than ever, we need to make progress might not have the type of interaction that would
on the experimental side to give some hints to be accessible to the LHC or to a future collider.
theorists about the most promising direction Colliders are one tool that we have to explore dark
for developing new ideas. matter, but not the only one.

The likes of supersymmetry, a theory that would fill in gaps in Is fundamental physics in a bit of a funk, trying to think too
our understanding of the universe that the standard model of much about established theories concerning things like dark
physics can’t, predict a bevy of new particles, but the LHC has matter and not about new ideas?
detected no sign of them. Does that mean these theories have I think you are correct. We have to approach our
ceased to be viable? explorations with a very open mind. That’s why the
We have to be very careful about that. I consider LHC experiments – in particular the two general-
supersymmetry a very nice theory. The fact that purpose experiments, ATLAS and CMS – have been
we haven’t found any sign of it as yet may indicate built in a way that, in principle, allows them to detect
two things. One, supersymmetry is wrong. Fine. Or, any type of new particles, whether from an established
supersymmetry sits at an energy scale above where theoretical scenario like supersymmetry or extra
we are exploring now, or alternatively manifests itself dimensions, or something new. It’s very important
through particles that are extremely light and to be very broad and very open.
extremely weakly interacting.
Our goal isn’t to run behind a given theory. CERN has published plans for the Future Circular Collider,
Theories are good benchmarks, but nature may a larger version of the LHC. What convinces you that this is
have chosen a completely different way. We have the way forward for particle physics?
to address the open questions – and there are many, First of all, CERN is doing design studies and R&D for
many of them – related to the Higgs boson and its two projects. One is a linear collider up to 50 kilometres
mass, the problem of dark matter, the problem of long called CLIC, which will smash electrons against
matter-antimatter asymmetry, and so on. positrons coming from the opposite direction. It will
allow detailed studies of the Higgs boson and provide
The LHC hasn’t been able to make anything that looks sensitivity to new physics up to very high-energy
like a dark matter particle. So where are they hiding? scales. The other is the Future Circular Collider, >

Chapter 6 | Beyond the standard model | 95

which is a ring like the Large Hadron Collider but three Obviously, we should also be spending money on
times bigger. mitigating climate change. But one doesn’t exclude
However, they aren’t just bigger, they also come the other. I think it is the duty and the right of
with much more sophisticated and powerful humanity to understand how nature works, how the
technologies that will allow us to make a big step universe evolved and how it will evolve in the future.
up in the energy and intensity of the particle Pushing back the limits of knowledge is one of our
beams compared with previous colliders. aspirations and obligations.
Apart from that, science in general, and particle
What is the benefit of that? physics in particular, is a driver of innovation, because
A Future Circular Collider can collide electron-positron our goals are often so ambitious that they require the
beams and proton-proton beams in more than one development of new technologies. From CERN alone,
experiment. An electron-positron collider would allow the spin-offs are huge: the World Wide Web, medical
detailed studies of not just the Higgs boson, but other applications and many others.
known particles. A proton-proton collider would allow And there is also another important role of
the production and observation of heavy, new particles. science nowadays: to foster collaboration across
borders and all over the world. In a fractured world
Some theoretical models suggest that there aren’t any more with many forces pulling it apart rather than together,
particles at the energy scales we can realistically reach with science is still an example of what humanity can do
a collider. Wouldn’t it be a big gamble to build these things? when we use our cultural diversity to work together
What is the goal of particle physics, and in particular and do something good.
of colliders? Is it to discover new particles, or to make
a step forward in our understanding of fundamental What achievement are you most proud of, both personally and
physics? The LEP [Large Electron-Positron] Collider, for CERN?
which was the predecessor of the Large Hadron From the point of view of my scientific career,
Collider, didn’t discover a single particle, and yet there I had the fortune to be involved in the Large Hadron
are few projects in the history of particle physics that Collider project right from the beginning, developing
have progressed our understanding of fundamental the detector and analysis techniques for the ATLAS
interactions so much. experiment and then being on the forefront at the
The goal of any scientific exploration is to make time the Higgs boson was discovered. That was clearly
progress in our understanding of nature. Discovering a a great satisfaction. I’ve been lucky enough to grow in
new particle is one way, but very precise measurement this lab, and I am very grateful for what I got, not only
of known particles is as important, as is ruling out ideas as a physicist, but also as a human being. It has helped
that are unfounded. me develop as an open and tolerant person. I think the
atmosphere of this place is very special. There are a
What would you say to people who say it isn’t worth spending few places like it, but not so many. We should cherish
that amount of money on particle physics, that it should go on them, because the world definitely and desperately
something like mitigating climate change? needs them. ❚

96 | New Scientist Essential Guide | Particle Physics

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