New Muon Measurement Hints at Unknown Physics Beyond the Standard Model

Protestant to tell us after all this that there is where to start there's been a discovery it was announced yesterday that indicates there's potentially new physics that we've we don't know of I know it's a big statement Fermi lab in Illinois is where this experiment was done have you ever heard of the standard model any have you ever seen anything that looks like this yeah this is basically all the particles that we know of and all the forces that we know of electrons protons everything they make up our atoms there's evidence from this experiment that there's maybe something beyond that this is huge because the standard model has been like a work of decades it comes from Theory and

experimentation and one of the last particles that we had theorized from the standard model and then discovered was the Higgs boson which was that massive experiment at CERN so for there to not even be theorized particles you know what I mean like it's not even in our Theory it's just evidence that there's something beyond our Theory and Beyond on anything we've ever seen so that is what this announcement means or potentially means so I say potentially because what the experiment was that was just announced it's not precise enough for it to be considered a big scientific announcement okay so what it is very complicated have you ever heard of a muon no great okay but you've heard of electrons they're in these terrible

models of atoms there are other particles that are not as common they're actually a lot of them for example the Higgs boson another example is neutrinos and another example is the muon and the muon is oh the myON was discovered in 1936 because they were looking at the way that electrons move in a magnetic field and then they see another particle come through and it has a much wider Arc and they're like what the heck is that so if you've ever heard that if you've got just a uniform magnetic field and you shoot a Charged particle through it'll curve have you heard of this okay does it make sense okay good I'm glad I asked what is another example of this happening oh in CERN the reason that particles go around

and around is because they're charged particles and they're going around in these big magnetic fields and it makes them curve and then when they Collide and all this stuff comes off they're watching how they curve in a magnetic field that's why you see all these spiral lines coming off of the Collision because if a particle has a negative or a positive charge it'll curve one way or the other way in a magnetic field if it doesn't have a charge at all like a neutron it just goes straight so you'll see those Spirals and then you'll see the straight lines so there's these guys and then they see another particle come through and it has a much wider Arc much wider means that it has more mass so

they found this particle they're like what is that turns out it is just like the electrons a lot of people call it the cousin to the electron but it has 207 times the mass oh so that's what they're just they discovered they discovered the muon if you had a bunch of muons instead of electrons in your atoms you would be way heavier I don't know how much heavier um okay so the measurement that was just made was that oh this is the part where it's going to get really tricky you know how a top that's spinning will kind of wobble around if the top were in space it wouldn't do that it would just spin it wouldn't Wobble the reason that it's wobbling is because it's spinning in a gravitational field and gravity is

having an effect on the top and making it wobble can you accept that I'm good because I don't want to go in similarly there's another really complicated property of particles called spin it's not like the particles actually spinning it's just a property but when you put a particle with Magnetic spin in a magnetic field it'll wobble in the similar way the amount that it would wobble is something that we can predict say that the amount of wobble is supposed to be two the amount of the amount it's supposed to wobble is called the G factor and the theoretical number is supposed to be 2 for the muon now there's something else weird that we've theorized which is that the wobble should also be affected by something that people call quantum foam

have you heard of the idea that there are constantly particles popping in and out of existence in the vacuum of space yeah okay so those particles popping in and out when that happens they can interact with a particle a real particle that exists like a muon and then they can affect that wobble I know that this is getting to the point where it's like okay what is the point of all of this we've got quantum foam affecting the wobble but we're almost there and we have a number for that and it's like it's close to the two it's like two point 2.0 zero and then there's this added correction two three one eight three six two zero eight six and eight six is parentheses for the error now that's obviously a very precise

theoretical measurement 12 digits of precision that we think we know the theory theoretical amount of the effect of the wobble from the quantum foam they did a measurement of the G factor of the amount of wobble and they saw it didn't match the theoretical number so it didn't match it by um in the last four digits of that 11 digit you saw instead of three six two zero you saw four one two this already mean that the foam is not causing no it doesn't mean that the foam is not causing it means that it means that there's probably particles that we don't know of or forces we don't know of because we have such a precise idea of what how the wobble should change based off of known particles and how we know

they pop up into existence so if we measure something different most likely it must be that the physics is different so you brought us in here to tell us after all this that there's more we don't know we might know less than we thought but it's it's the way that we don't know more that's important it's it's not like oh we don't know what happened before the Big Bang it's like no we're seeing evidence for something specific to go look for right here's the moment when physicists are like oh my god let's go look for new particles let's go look for new forces okay maybe it's not that important to you to go look for new particles but have you seen CERN it's huge like that entire experiment was looking for one new

particle I know like there's nothing specific to look for yet because it doesn't fit our theories like when we look for the Higgs boson it was part of the standard model Theory yeah it was like there's the Higgs right there here's a grayed out box of a particle we have a theory for and then we discovered it and like Boop fill that in with the color but we're seeing an anomaly we're seeing something act differently than we ever predicted before it's like winning at Bingo and then someone's like look a new alphabet or it's like winning a bingo and then you get another bingo card Bingo Plus yeah that's pretty crazy doesn't fit the standard model I know so it could be new particles new forces or

something wrong about our current theory but we know so much about our current theory and so many of our very expensive very precise experiments have verified what we know so for the idea that some of it to be wrong is almost as inconceivable as for there to be new particles and new theories which is also inconceivable at this point but yeah exciting you have them they're confident there's something really big to find why can't it just something I haven't thought of like anything magnetic on earth like where we are in place in the Galaxy so one reason they're confident about this result is that it was done before in 2001. so it was originally done in Brookhaven National Labs in 2001 and it was such a

big result at the time that they're like we have to verify this and so they took the big old magnet a big superconducting magnet 50 foot in diameter here it is see that red thing that's the magnet arriving at Family lab to a big party and a big celebration because it was transported 3 200 miles to upgrade it I went to Fermi lab in 2016 and the only picture I took besides like oh this is a pretty view down the building was of this diagram that shows the path that the magnet took okay so this is not this is not technically a discovery yet and the reason I said that is because you need a certain amount of certainty a certain you need a certain certainty to consider a scientific announcement as is

like an actual Discovery and you need it to be something called five Sigma which is just like a statistical amount the exciting thing is that they verified a result from 2001 but again normally and rightfully five Sigma is the amount of certainty that you usually need to make this to make this type of announcement so since they're only at 4.2 Sigma scientists are being careful and saying like yes this is exciting we verified a result from a previous experiment so that's promising but it's not promising enough because we don't have enough certainty oh they're going to keep it here and they're going to upgrade the experiment for future runs um and get more Precision the chance that this measurement is a random

fluctuation like a random statistical error in the measurement is one in forty thousand like not enough that I would bet my life on but that's usually so small or so big that's like weirdly normal number usually talking about like the billions or the quantum right we know enough of that to make a good enough prediction of what the change in this little Wobble the G Factor should be and we see something different that's it big announcement yay okay and cut so actually when I was doing my experiment looking for dark matter in college when we first turned it on one of the first things we saw was a muon pi the person running the experiment was like oh see that blipped that signal that's a muon we just detected these cosmic ray

muons which are these particles raining down we were making a detector that was looking for actually neutrons all these are just different particles and the device was like this I'm making it this big but it's actually like I don't know what's here to here like 10 feet um it's a big chamber full of this fluid called scintillator and it's a really cool flute because if you just like barely look in there you see a little glow so particle will come through this scintillator and they'll cause it to Glow along the path and then we had detectors on either end that would capture the light and so you'd see oh a particle came through because we got a little bit of blip of Light which meant that something came through our

scintillator that's how the detector worked so we turned it on and we were like we got a little flash of light that's probably a muon we just saw a cosmic raymion any more questions okay the other really cool thing that melons were used for was to verify one of the predictions of special relativity from Einstein specifically time dilation and this was a long time ago 1941. have you heard of time dilation the basic idea is that if we were moving really fast like if I was jetting through the universe then time would tick slower for me which is cool there's a lot I mean there's a lot more to it ah basically time takes differently depending on whether you're moving or not if you went and traveled around the earth a bunch of times in a really

fast rocket ship it came back you would have aged less than I would have aged that was a prediction of Relativity but not verified until later and one of the verifications was this really cool experiment the thing about muons is that they don't live very long they have a mean lifetime of 2.2 microseconds but there are a lot of them constantly raining down on us because a lot of them are produced when cosmic rays come from the universe and they hit our atmosphere imagine you can measure how many muons there are like go up on top of a hill and measure how many are coming through a little area and then go down to the bottom of the mountain and you know how fast these muons are supposed to Decay

so you should go to the bottom and you should only see a certain number because the rest of them should have decayed but what happened is they saw more at the bottom than they should have more were surviving but what that means is that because these muons are going so fast time is ticking slower for them they're actually not decaying because they haven't reached that mean lifetime so that was a verification of this idea of Relativity does that make sense