Electron’s nearly perfect roundness stymies the search for “new physics”
|October 19, 2018||Posted by News under Cosmology, Intelligent Design, Matter: atoms, Physics|
The Standard Model of physics holds that electrons should be almost perfectly round. As it happens,
The electron gets its shape from the way that positive and negative charges are distributed inside the particle. The best theory for how particles behave, called the standard model of particle physics, holds that the electron should keep its rotund figure almost perfectly.
But some theories suggest that an entourage of hypothetical subatomic particles outside the electron could create a slight separation between the positive and negative charges, giving the electron a pear shape.
Now, the Advanced Cold Molecule Electron Electric Dipole Moment, or ACME, search, based at Harvard University, has probed the electron’s EDM with the most precision ever — and still found no sign of smooshing, the team reports online October 17 in Nature.Lisa Grossman, “What the electron’s near-perfect roundness means for new physics” at Science News
Plans for a much larger collider are already underway. The new physics, it is thought, must be in there somewhere.
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