It’s five theories for the price of one. One of the most ambitious physics theories in recent times claims to have solved five of the biggest head-scratchers in particle physics – each of them likely worthy of a Nobel prize in their own right.
Crazy as the idea sounds, the paper describing it has managed to get past peer-review at Physical Review Letters – a prestigious journal that has catalogued many of the most groundbreaking moments in physics history, such as the discovery of gravitational waves last year.
The new theory adds six new particles to the standard model’s current 17, and so ties up the mysteries of:
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What is dark matter?
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What caused inflation?
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Why is the neutrino so light?
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Why is there more matter than antimatter in the universe.
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AND they threw in a solution to problem with asymmetry in the strong force to boot.
It’s because of these problems that we know the standard model of particle physics can’t be complete. Still, it is rare for theorists to try to tackle more than one or two of its shortfalls at once. Now, four European physicists led by Guillermo Ballesteros at the National Centre for Scientific Research in France, have taken ideas from several previous theories and stitched them together to form a coherent framework.
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