New Scientist Essential Guide 15 2022 Particle Physics.pdf

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ESSENTIAL
GUIDE№15
QUANTUM FIELDS AND FORCES
THE STANDARD MODEL
ANTIMATTER
THE HIGGS BOSON
DARK MATTER AND ENERGY
THE SEARCH FOR BETTER THEORIES
AND MORE
PARTICLE
PHYSICS
UNDERSTANDING
REALITY’S BUILDING
BLOCKS
EDITED BY
RICHARD WEBB
NEW
SCIENTIST
ESSENTIAL
GUIDE
PA RTICLE
PHYSICS
EW areas of science have seen such a revolution
in our understanding over the past 100 years or
so than particle physics. Indeed, at the turn of
the 20th century, it didn’t even exist as a field of
enquiry. The first of the particles we now regard
as fundamental, the electron, had only been discovered
in 1897; the atomic nucleus was as-yet unheard of.
What has followed, culminating in the establishment
of the “standard model” of particle physics, has been a
triumph of both pure and applied science, as theorists
have, time and again, predicted the existence of new
particle phenomena, later to have them corroborated
by experiment.
This 15th
New Scientist Essential Guide
celebrates
those achievements, but also emphasises the many
gaps and mysteries that convince particle physicists
that the standard model is far from a final answer,
and that much remains to discover – from the true
nature of gravity to why the particles of the standard
model are arranged as they are. I hope you enjoy it.
The other titles in the
Essential Guide
series can be
bought by visiting shop.newscientist.com; feedback
is welcome at essentialguides@newscientist.com.
Richard Webb
F
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ADDITIONAL CONTRIBUTORS
Robert Adler, Gilead Amit, Anil Ananthaswamy, Abigail Beall, Michael Brooks,
Jon Cartwright, Matthew Chalmers, Daniel Cossins, Roger Highfield, Dan Hooper,
Joshua Howgego, Thomas Lewton, Christine Sutton, Phil Walker, Richard Webb
1
| New Scientist Essential Guide | Particle Physics
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
ORIGINS
O F PA RT I C L E
PHYSICS
THE
STANDARD
MODEL
ANTIMATTER
The incredible diversity of our cosmos
stems from a handful of essential
building blocks and their interactions,
now codified by the standard model
of particle physics. Arriving at that
insight involved overturning many
long-held ideas about how the
material world works.
p. 6
Beyond the atom
p. 9
Forces and quantum fields
p. 10
Richard Feynman
and his diagrams
p. 13
The creation of the
standard model
p. 16
ESSAY: Dave Goldberg
Why symmetries matter
p. 20
Emmy Noether’s struggle
From electrons to neutrinos and
quarks to photons, the standard
model of physics relies on a small
zoo of particles acted on by just
three forces. Is that enough?
p. 24
Leptons and the rule of three
p. 26
Fundamental force:
Electromagnetism
p. 28
INTERVIEW: Alex Keshavarzi
“Muons could reveal other
particles we can’t see”
p. 30
The mystery of neutrinos
p. 32
Fundamental force:
The weak nuclear force
p. 34
Chien-Shiung Wu’s
broken mirror
p. 35
The quirks of quarks
p. 37
Fundamental force:
The strong nuclear force
One of the most startling revelations
to have emerged from quantum
theories of the particle realm is
the existence of the mirror world
of antimatter. Even more startling is
the standard model’s insistence that
if antimatter exists, we shouldn’t.
p. 42
What is antimatter?
p. 44
The strange world of Paul Dirac
p. 45
Timeline of antimatter
p. 46
The great matter-antimatter
imbalance
p. 49
Majorana’s mystery
p. 51
Does antimatter fall up?
2
| New Scientist Essential Guide | Particle Physics
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
THE
HIGGS
BOSON
PA RT I C L E
PHYSICS
AND THE
COSMOS
More than 95 per cent of the stuff in
the universe comes in the form of dark
matter and energy, entities not covered
by the standard model. This isn’t the
only way that our theories fall down
in describing the wider cosmos.
p. 68
Missing dark matter
p. 72
The dark energy mystery
p. 74
What caused cosmic inflation?
p. 76
Beyond four forces
p. 79
Fundamental force: Gravity
BEYOND
THE
STANDARD
MODEL
For all the standard model’s
successes, its manifest gaps and
deficiencies have physicists itching
for something more – theories that can
unify the forces of physics, including
gravity, on one consistent basis.
p. 82
Desperately seeking
supersymmetry
p. 87
ESSAY: Michael Duff
Is string theory the answer?
p. 90
Hunting the magnetic monopole
p. 91
The lure of anomalies
p. 94
INTERVIEW: Fabiola Gianotti
“The world needs places
like CERN”
Few advances in physics captured
the imagination like the 2012 discovery
of the Higgs boson, the particle that
gives all other fundamental particles
their mass. In the decade since,
the Higgs has presented particle
physicists with a profound problem:
it works exactly as they predicted.
p. 54
ESSAY: Jon Butterworth
How the Higgs was found
p. 58
LHC, extreme machine
p. 59
Is the Higgs too dull?
p. 61
The hierarchy problem
p. 63
INTERVIEW: Peter Higgs
“I have achieved notoriety,
not immortality”
New Scientist Essential Guide | Particle Physics |
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