5th Important Force of Nature Discovered in New Lab Experiment

Physicists recently said they had discovered probable signs of a fifth fundamental force of nature, showing findings coming from a study carried out at a laboratory near Chicago.

A BBC News report said all of the forces experienced every day can be decreased to only four categories: gravity, electromagnetism, the strong force, and the weak force.

These four fundamental forces govern the manner all objects and particles in the Universe are interacting with each other.

For instance, gravity makes objects fall on the ground, and heavy objects are behaving as if they are stuck or fastened to the floor.

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The New Force of Nature

The United Kingdom's Science and Technology Facilities Council or STFC said the outcome offers strong evidence for the presence of an undiscovered sub-atomic particle or the so-called 'new force of nature.'

Nevertheless, the results from the experiment called Muon g-2 do not contribute to a conclusive discovery yet. There is presently a one in 40,000 probability that the outcome could be a statistical coincidence, equating to a statistical confidence level described as 4.1 sigma.

Essentially, a level of '5 sigma,' or a one in 3.5 million probability of the experiment being accidental, is needed to consider such a discovery.

According to the UK leader for the experiment, Professor Mark Lancaster, they have found the interaction of muons are not in agreement with the Standard Model, the present widely accepted notion to explain the manner the Universe's building blocks are behaving.

The University of Manchester researchers also said; clearly, this new development is exciting since it is potentially pointing to a future with new laws of physics, new particles, and a new force that has not been seen to date.

'Muons' Sub-Atomic Particles

The result is that the latest in a string of promising outcomes from particle physics experiments in the United States, Japan, and the latest, from the Large Hadron Collider on the Swiss-French border.

According to Cambridge University's Prof. Ben Allanach, who was not part of this latest initiative said, his sense is "tingling and telling him" that his discovery will be real.

All his career, he said, he has been looking for forces and particles outside what is already known today, and this is it.

The investigation, based at the Fermilab or Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Illinois, quests for signs of new phenomena in physics by examining the behavior of sub-atomic particles, as described in CERN's site, also known as 'muons.'

There are building blocks of the world that are even tinier than the atom. Some of these sub-atomic particles comprise even smaller constituents, while others cannot be broken down into any other fundamental particles.

Essentially, the muon is one of these essential particles. It is akin to the electron, although it's more than 200 times heavier.

The Muon g-2 experiment, as described by Fermilab, encompasses sending the particles around a 14-meter ring and then applying a magnetic field.

Under the present law of physics, included in the Standard Model, this should make the muons shake or wobble at a specific rate.

Instead, the physicists discovered that muons wobbled at a speedier rate than expected. This might be driven by a force of nature that's totally new to science.

The Muon g-2 experiment is explained on Femilab's YouTube video below: