
EXPLAINED: Wayne State professor tells why you should care about this physics revelation
It’s not every day that physicists are completely baffled. But some recent tests show that the decades-old standard model, which is the playbook for physics, may not perfectly explain everything in the universe. “People for the last 70 years have tried to find measurements that are not explained by the standard model. Nothing,” said Alexy Petrov, a Wayne State University particle physicist. “Everything was perfectly explained by the standard model. This might be the first one that’s not explained.” Petrov wasn’t involved with this particular study, but he does very similar work. He said they sent a strange particle called a muon, that only lasts for two microseconds, around a track in order to get a better look at it. “It’s a very difficult measurement to do,” Petrov said. “They put them in something called the storage ring, they move them very fast and before they decay they have to measure how the magnetic field effects them.” The early results were 0.1 percent off what the standard model predicts, and that little difference could expand the physics universe as we know it. “If this holds up, the new physics, this thing that we don’t know, is just around the corner. It might tell us the nature of dark matter,” Petrov said.