Wibbly wobbly, timey wimey stuff: Subatomic particle might break the laws of physics – CNET [CNET]

When you fire up the Large Hadron Collider and use its globally supreme power to demolition-derby a couple of ordinary particles together, not only can you create a mind-boggling collision force of 13 teraelectronvolts; you might also find you’ve produced a subatomic particle whose strange little wobbling might break the laws of physics altogether. 

It’s called a muon. And on Wednesday, researchers at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory sent shock waves through the world of particle physics when they found that this unassuming speck of quantum-curious existence could illuminate the very fabric of the universe in a way we haven’t seen since the discovery of the Higgs boson nearly a decade ago.

At 207 times bigger than electrons, the magnet-like muons radioactively decay into pieces in 2.2 millionths of a second, making them unlikely candidates for an explosive physics discovery, according to a richly reported New York Times story Wednesday. But then the muons started wobbling weirdly. So weirdly that the wobbles routinely defy the world’s most hyper-specific measurements and appear to be influenced by what physicists say may be forces outside of those currently known. 

“This quantity we measure reflects the interactions of the muon with everything else in the universe,” said Renee Fatemi, a physicist at the University of Kentucky, in a release. “This is strong evidence that the muon is sensitive to something that is not in our best theory.”

In quantum physics, a theory holds that particles can suddenly appear and influence an item they interact with before disappearing again. Researchers working on muons say that the tiny variations in the muons’ wobbles can be attributed to the influence of a potential host of these “virtual particles.”

Although the findings follow in the footsteps of similar experiments in 2013 and 2018, the latest results will still require more vetting. 

In the meantime, however, you can find more on the mind-blowing muons by checking out Fermilab’s ordinary-folk-friendly video explainer. 

Read more: CERN wants to build a new $23 billion super-collider that’s 100 kilometers long