Hidden world

• Autores: Abigail Beall
• Localización: New scientist, ISSN 0262-4079, Nº. 3142, 2017, págs. 38-41
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • Beall investigates the possibility of unlocking the hidden world beneath the surface of the electron. Physicists had four decades to scratch their heads before the plot thickened again. Starting in 1974, a series of experiments at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center in California uncovered another sibling of the electron, this one 3400 times as massive and named the tau. Today, physicists refer to the electron, the muon and the tau--collectively known as the charged leptons--as being different "flavors" of the same particle. "It is as if someone has put an electron through a Xerox machine and set the number of copies to three," says John Ellis, a particle physicist at King's College London. Actually, it's as if that mysterious photocopying has been carried out right across the standard model, their best description of the fundamental particles and forces of nature.