The quest for physics outside the Standard Model often takes place at major accelerator facilities like CERN’s Large Hadron Collider or huge underground detectors for neutrinos, dark matter and other exotic particles. Researchers in the Netherlands have now opened an alternative front in this quest by developing a new laboratory-scale technique for trapping heavy neutral molecules. Such molecules are considered ideal candidates for detecting beyond-the-Standard-Model asymmetries in the electron’s electric dipole moment (eEDM), but previous methods were not capable of confining them. The technique therefore gives physicists a fresh set of tools for finding new physics.
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