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Posted on October 1, 2018
Last week, we reported that strange phenomena at the South Pole could be explained by the physics of supersymmetry, according to Derek Fox, observational astrophysicist at Pennsylvania State University. The team of researchers has found new evidence suggesting that some particles detected in Antarctica do not fit the standard model.
On the arXiv preprint server, they published a paper outlining their arguments and explaining whether "Beyond the Standard Model" (BSM) particles are needed to explain the events detected by the Antarctic Antarctic Antarctic antenna (ANITA). ) from NASA, an antenna carried by a south-facing balloon. The team concluded that if they are correctly interpreted, they are.
Their analysis simply shows that, except for error in data collection or analysis, it is very unlikely (less than 1 in 3 million) that the observations can be explained by the standard model. In the article, they claim that the observations could be consistent with a supposed particle in some supersymmetric extension of the standard model consistent with string theory, but this is only one of many possible explanations .
The confirmation of the phenomenon of cosmic rays emerging from the Earth sub-EeV in data from other facilities confirms the reality of ANITA events, reports Phys.org. "Three neutrino events from the extremely high energy northern runway of the IceCube Neutrino Observatory bring new evidence in the form of sensor data from the IceCube experiment, in which sensors buried in the Antarctic Ice continuously detect particulate events. The sensor data showed that three events with unexplained properties had occurred. The researchers suggest that the two unrelated data sources indicate that it is time to start asking if the anomalies suggest the possibility of particles beyond the standard model. "
The Penn State team detected the mysterious particle that was spinning in space from the depths beneath the old ice cap of the South Pole. It is a high-energy particle that has traveled through space for billions of years and crashed against the Earth, defying what physicists call the Standard Model (MS) of particle physics . But cosmic rays should not do that, scientists have begun to wonder if these mysterious beams consist of particles never seen before.
"An ultra-high energy cosmic ray located on the other side of the Earth could have generated a new type of particle, about 500 times more massive than the proton, which broke through the planet before disintegrating to produce rain upward. A theoretical framework called supersymmetry offers candidates who would do the trick, Fox added.
Since March 2016, researchers have been puzzled over two events in Antarctica where cosmic rays have sprung from the Earth. They were detected by NASA's transient antarctic antenna (ANITA), an antenna embedded in a balloon hovering over the southern mainland. proposes several theories for these "ascending" cosmic rays, sterile neutrinos (neutrinos that rarely return to matter) to "atypical dark matter distributions within the Earth".
Twice in the last 13 years, according to Adrain Cho in Science, particles from outer space have crossed the Earth to enter the atmosphere over Antarctica, triggering weak pulsations of radio waves captured by a balloon detector located 35 km from the ice cap. . A team of astrophysicists explained in a new study that these two events are digging a hole in the standard model of particles and fundamental forces of physicists, and suggest the existence of new particles.
"So … uh, guys? I think that @ steinly0 [Steinn Sigurdsson], some colleagues and I just broke the standard model, "tweeted Fox. But Dave Besson, a physicist at the University of Kansas at Lawrence and a member of the team who initially observed the events with the balloon experience, says that, as part of this collaboration, "I do not think anyone wants to say that we broke the standard model. "
ANITA, a NASA-funded experiment, has floated around the South Pole four times since 2006. It is mainly looking for evidence of elusive particles called neutrinos that smash in the ice and trigger particle sprays that then emit revealing radio waves. ANITA has not yet spotted such signals. However, the instrument has detected radio signals produced by other types of space particles, known as generic cosmic rays, when they collide with the Earth.
When a cosmic ray, such as a proton, strikes the atmosphere, it triggers an avalanche of charged particles of energy, called a rain of air. The path of the shower tilts in the Earth's magnetic field, which allows it to produce radio waves emitted in front of the shower as a lighthouse. ANITA generally perceives radio waves from downpours after bouncing off the ice and reflecting back to the balloon. From time to time, he spots radio waves coming directly from the air showers moving laterally in the atmosphere from the horizon.
Both signals differ in a key way. The radio waves are polarized in a manner determined by the direction of the Earth's magnetic field. But this polarization switches when the radio waves are reflected on the ice, while a signal from a side shower retains its original polarization.
However, twice, continues Cho in Science, during its first flight in 2006 and its third flight in 2014, ANITA detected odd radio waves with unreturned polarizations rising from the surface instead of the horizon. This suggests that the signals were produced by progressive rise showers triggered by particles that passed through the Earth. At first glance, this is not a problem for the standard model. Neutrinos hardly interact with matter. It is therefore possible that two cosmic neutrinos have crossed the planet before striking an atomic nucleus in the ice and triggering an ascending rain.
However, once examined in detail, this explanation falls apart, say Fox and his colleagues. The researchers estimate that, given the indications given by the showers, the particles that formed them had to cross more than 5700 kilometers of the Earth. However, large showers show that the particles must have an energy greater than 0.5 exa-electron-volts, or 70,000 times more than the energy obtained with the most powerful particle accelerator. Such extreme energy increases the likelihood that neutrinos interact with other materials. There is therefore no chance that a neutrino of this energy will survive at this point, say the researchers in a new document posted on the arXiv preprint server and submitted to Physical. Review D.
So, did ANITA detect a particle not taken into account in the standard model? The new document uploaded on Sept. 26 on the pre-print server arXiv showed that there were more particles with high energy upward than those detected at both ANITA events. Three times, they wrote that IceCube (the other largest neutrino observatory in Antarctica featured at the top of the page) had detected similar particles, although no one has yet linked them to the mystery of the ice. ; ANITA.
The ANITA team itself has noticed the two strange events, describing them in previous articles, but Besson warns against abandoning the conclusions. The whole analysis assumes that the non-inverted polarizations of the two signals prove that they come from particles coming from the Earth. "This is not a slam dunk," says Besson. Surface effects and other factors could be considered to dissipate the polarization of a signal emitted by downward particle rain, he says. "My personal point of view is that we are doing too much of these events that are completely dependent on a polarization argument."
Fox says its goal is to get the community to take seriously the possibility that ANITA's results indicate new physics. He points out that he does not claim to have discovered a new particle. But it remains true to the statement in the paper that the data exclude a standard explanation of events at the level of statistical confidence that particle physicists need to claim a definitive discovery.
The fate of ANITA could also depend on the debate. NASA has not yet funded a fifth flight, says Besson, and if that's the case, the flight will likely focus on such strange events.
By combining the IceCube and ANITA datasets, Penn State researchers calculated that whatever particle is discharged from the depths of the South Pole, it is much less likely to be part of the standard model. (In technical and statistical terms, their results had confidences of 5.8 and 7.0 sigma, depending on the calculation you are considering.)
"I thought to myself," This model does not make much sense, "Fox reporter Fox told Rafi Letzter of Live Science.Fox, the main author of the new newspaper, said he had discovered the events of ANITA in May 2018, in one of the previous newspapers that was trying to explain them. "But the [ANITA] The result is very intriguing, so I started checking. I started talking to my office neighbor Steinn Sigurdsson [the second author on the paper, who is also at Penn State] whether we could perhaps obtain more plausible explanations than the documents published to date. "
Fox, Sigurdsson, and their colleagues began searching for other similar events in the data collected by other detectors. When they came across possible events on the rise in the IceCube data, he realized that he might have found something really revolutionary for physics.
"That's what really motivated me and I looked at ANITA events with the utmost seriousness," Fox said, adding, "That's the reason for the physicists' lives. Break the patterns, establish new constraints [on reality], learn about the universe we did not know. "
The Daily Galaxy via the Daily Galaxy via Arxiv.org, Science and Live Science
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