Researchers from the Institute for Nuclear Research at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (Atomki) have published groundbreaking findings about a fifth force in physics. Till now only four forces were known to control our universe – gravity, electromagnetism, the weak nuclear force, and the strong force.
Crux of the Matter
The team achieved the results by watching the way in which an excited helium atom emitted light as it decayed.
Dubbed as X17 because of its mass of 17 megaelectronvolts, the particle was emitted at an angle of 115 degrees, which is currently unexplained by the Standard Model of particle physics.
The study’s lead scientist, Attila Krasznahorkay is examining this photophobic force as a particle which connects our visible world with the dark matter, which accounts for about 85 percent of all the matter in the universe.
Deemed as a Nobel prize-worthy experiment, this comes three years after a similar finding was published by the scientists, conducted with another type of atom named beryllium-8.
Presuming it was not the result of an error by scientists in the laboratory, Jonathan Feng, a physics professor at UCLA, said the finding is so impressive that it could pave the way to uncovering even more world forces.
Curiopedia
Unified Field Theory is a type of field theory that allows fundamental forces and elementary particles to be written in terms of a pair of physical and virtual fields. According to the modern discoveries in physics, forces are not transmitted directly between interacting objects but instead are described and interrupted by intermediary entities called fields. The term was coined by Albert Einstein, who attempted to unify his general theory of relativity with electromagnetism. More Info
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