Did Fermilab’s new result blow a hole in the Standard Model?
Fermilab’s TeVatron just released the best mass measurement of the W-boson, ever. Here’s what doesn’t add up.
In the entire history of science, no theory has been more successful, in terms of predictions matching the results of experiments and observations, than the Standard Model of particle physics. Describing all of the known elementary particles as well as three of the fundamental forces relating them — electromagnetism, the strong nuclear force, and the weak nuclear force — we’ve never once conducted an experiment whose results contradicted this theory’s predictions. Particle accelerators from Brookhaven to SLAC to LEP to HERA to Fermilab to the Large Hadron Collider have tried again and again, but have never once found a robust anomaly that’s held up to further scrutiny.
And yet, in a new paper published in the April 8, 2022 issue of Science, the Collider Detector at Fermilab (CDF) experimental collaboration just released their latest results, which offer the most precise measurements of the mass of one of those fundamental particles, the W-boson, ever. Although the Standard Model predicts its rest mass energy, exquisitely, to be 80.36 giga-electron-volts (GeV), the CDF collaboration instead found 80.43 GeV, with an uncertainty of…
