Evidence for a fifth force

[swansont]

https://www.sciencealert.com/physicists-claim-a-they-ve-found-even-more-evidence-of-a-new-force-of-nature

“the researchers found pairs of electrons and positrons separating at an angle that didn't match currently accepted models. This time, the number was closer to 115 degrees.

Working backwards, the team calculated the helium's nucleus could also have produced a short-lived boson with a mass just under 17 megaelectronvolts.”

[koti]

1 hour ago, swansont said:

https://www.sciencealert.com/physicists-claim-a-they-ve-found-even-more-evidence-of-a-new-force-of-nature

“the researchers found pairs of electrons and positrons separating at an angle that didn't match currently accepted models. This time, the number was closer to 115 degrees.

Working backwards, the team calculated the helium's nucleus could also have produced a short-lived boson with a mass just under 17 megaelectronvolts.”

And the fifth to connect them all.
Sounds very interesting...10^-14 seconds life span is responsible for not coming across this earlier ?

[Danijel Gorupec]

Must every boson mean a force? (Higgs boson too?)

[Strange]

3 minutes ago, Danijel Gorupec said:

Must every boson mean a force? (Higgs boson too?)

I *think* that bosons which are force carriers have non-zero spin. Although it is not mentioned in this article, that is claimed to be the case for this new boson. (The Higgs boson is spin 0, because the High field is scalar.)

[koti]

5 minutes ago, Danijel Gorupec said:

Must every boson mean a force? (Higgs boson too?)

There are 2 bosons (W and Z) which mediate one force the weak interaction so I guess the answer is no. 

 

Edited November 23, 2019 by koti

[swansont]

1 hour ago, koti said:

And the fifth to connect them all.
Sounds very interesting...10^-14 seconds life span is responsible for not coming across this earlier ?

The W and Z are significantly shorter, so that’s not it. I’m guessing it’s that the interaction strength is small, making it hard to notice. It’s a tiny deflection of electrons, which have a small mass.

[MigL]

Uhmm, I wonder...

The gluon is a massless particle, which because of its properties, acts, in some ways like a massive particle.
Its 'residual' interaction results in the short range force that used to be called ( before QCD ) the strong nuclear, and binds protons and neutrons to the confines of the nucleus.
Could this 'apparent' force again be the result of 'residual' interactions ?
I haven't read the paper, and frankly I don't know whether I could make heads or tails out of it.

( and I don't wanna learn a 'new' standard model )

[J.C.MacSwell]

I knew it! All those things my wife accused me of were not due to me...

...from now on I can plead the fifth!

 

[koti]

11 hours ago, swansont said:

The W and Z are significantly shorter, so that’s not it. I’m guessing it’s that the interaction strength is small, making it hard to notice. It’s a tiny deflection of electrons, which have a small mass.

I’m not competent enough to get through the arxiv paper, could it be a measurement glitch? 

[Strange]

7 hours ago, koti said:

I’m not competent enough to get through the arxiv paper, could it be a measurement glitch? 

Anything could be a measurement error. (See also superluminal neutrinos). We can’t be sure about that until someone else reproduces the result

[Eise]

Ethan Siegel has a critical article about it.

Quote

 

Every so often, an experiment comes along in physics that gives a result that's inconsistent with the Universe as we currently understand it. Sometimes, it's nothing more than an error inherent to the specific design or execution of the particular experiment itself. At other times, it's an analysis error, where the way the experimental results are interpreted is at fault. At still other times, the experiment is right but there's a mistake in the theoretical predictions, assumptions, or approximations that went into extracting the predictions that the experiment failed to match.

Way, way down the list of scientific possibilities is the notion that we've actually discovered something fundamentally new to the Universe. If you were to read the latest hype surrounding a potential discovery of a new, fifth force and a new particle — the X17 — you might think we're on the cusp of a scientific revolution.

But that assumption is almost certainly wrong, and there's a ton of science to back it up. Here's what you need to know.

 

 

[swansont]

Ethan's article is quite correct: we need independent confirmation, with a different method and from some other group. That's more or less understood, though. Important points not mentioned in the original article include the existing kind of experiment which should have seen this, if it were real, and did not ("Lepton colliders producing electron-positron collisions at these relevant energies should have seen evidence for this particle; they have not") and that this group has made new particle claims before which have not panned out.