Is There a Higgs in the Standard Model?

2min Snip

00:00

Play full episode

Summary

Transcript

Episode notes

A particle called a beauty quark doesn't seem to be decaying into electrons and its heavier cousin than meon. As the standard model predicts, what exactly will you be looking for when you look at these decays? What could be happening in these decays is that ther could be particles that are not in the moral that are completely new particles, new fundamental particles. And if they interact differently with electrons than they do with new ones, that could lead to these distortions. So it's an exploration. We have some hints as to where to look from these kind of anomalies, but they don't guarantee that we'll find anything we don't th there's no guarantees were really callev off

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) has recently been switched back on after a three-year hiatus to resolve a mysterious and tantalising result from its previous run. So far, everything discovered at the LHC has agreed with the standard model, the guiding theory of particle physics that describes the building blocks of matter, and the forces that guide them. However, recent findings show particles behaving in a way that can’t be explained by known physics. Madeleine Finlay speaks to Guardian science correspondent Hannah Devlin and Prof Jon Butterworth about why this might be a clue towards solving some of the deepest mysteries of the universe, and how the LHC will be searching for a potential fifth force of nature. This podcast was amended on 12 May 2022. An earlier version incorrectly claimed that the standard model incorporates four fundamental forces of nature, instead of three.. Help support our independent journalism at theguardian.com/sciencepod