“From sticking a magnet on a fridge door to throwing a ball into a basketball hoop, the forces of physics are at play in every moment of our lives.“
The following written content by Pallab Ghosh
All of the forces we experience every day can be reduced to just four categories: gravity, electromagnetism, the strong force and the weak force.
Now, physicists say they have found possible signs of a fifth fundamental force of nature.
The findings come from research carried out at a laboratory near Chicago.
The four fundamental forces govern how all the objects and particles in the Universe interact with each other.
For example, gravity makes objects fall to the ground, and heavy objects behave as if they are glued to the floor.
The UK’s Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) said the result “provides strong evidence for the existence of an undiscovered sub-atomic particle or new force”.
But the results from the Muon g-2 experiment don’t add up to a conclusive discovery yet.
There is currently a one in a 40,000 chance that the result could be a statistical fluke – equating to a statistical level of confidence described as 4.1 sigma.
A level of 5 sigma, or a one in 3.5 million chance of the observation being a coincidence, is needed to claim a discovery.
Prof Mark Lancaster, who is the UK lead for the experiment, told BBC News: “We have found the interaction of muons are not in agreement with the Standard Model [the current widely accepted theory to explain how the building blocks of the Universe behave].”
The University of Manchester researcher added: “Clearly, this is very exciting because it potentially points to a future with new laws of physics, new particles and a new force which we have not seen to date.”
The finding is the latest in a string of promising results from particle physics experiments in the US, Japan, and most recently from the Large Hadron Collider on the Swiss-French border.
Prof Ben Allanach, from Cambridge University, who was not involved with the latest effort, said: “My Spidey sense is tingling and telling me that this is going to be real. Read more from BBC.
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