Together with their uncharged partner, the Z boson, the particles carry the weak nuclear force, which is responsible for certain types of radioactive decay and plays an important role in the nuclear reactions that power the sun. The particle comes in two varieties, with either positive or negative electric charge. “CDF’s new result seems barely compatible with the previous ones, including its own previous result, which prompts questions,” says ATLAS physicist Maarten Boonekamp of the Institute of Research into the Fundamental Laws of the Universe at Université Paris-Saclay.ĭiscovered in 1983, the W boson plays an important role in the standard model ( SN: 2/5/83). So physicists are awaiting further confirmation before declaring their prized theory incorrect. Still, several earlier, less precise measurements found W boson masses more closely aligned with the standard model, including one from the ATLAS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN near Geneva. “If confirmed, this would clearly mean very interesting new physics that we can explore,” says theoretical physicist Sven Heinemeyer of the Institute for Theoretical Physics in Madrid. The finding could hint at new particles or other mysteries of physics yet to be discovered. ![]() But the new measured mass is larger, at 80,433.5 MeV, physicists with the Collider Detector at Fermilab, or CDF, collaboration report in the April 8 Science. ![]() That theory predicts a W boson with a mass of about 80,357 million electron volts, or MeV. The result hints at a possible flaw in physicists’ otherwise stalwart theory of the fundamental bits and bobs of our world, known as the standard model. A new measurement of the mass of an elementary particle, the W boson, has defied expectations.
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