It’s like a huge mystery novel.” Gerald GabrielseĪttempting to “fix” the Standard Model, many alternative models predict that an electron’s seemingly uniform sphere is actually asymmetrically squished. ![]() We know the Standard Model is wrong, but we can’t seem to find where it’s wrong. Gabrielse and his ACME colleagues have spent their careers trying to close this loophole by examining the Standard Model’s predictions and then trying to confirm them through table-top experiments in the lab. “The Standard Model as it stands cannot possibly be right because it cannot predict why the universe exists,” said Gabrielse, the Board of Trustees Professor of Physics in Northwestern's Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences. This lack of contradiction has been puzzling physicists for decades. ![]() The model is a mathematical picture of reality, and no laboratory experiments yet performed have contradicted it. The sub-standard Standard ModelĪ longstanding theory, the Standard Model of particle physics describes most of the fundamental forces and particles in the universe. The trio leads the National Science Foundation (NSF)-funded Advanced Cold Molecule Electron (ACME) Electric Dipole Moment Search. Silsbee Professor of Physics at Harvard, and David DeMille, professor of physics at Yale. In addition to Gabrielse, the research was led by John Doyle, the Henry B. “But our finding is still just as scientifically significant because it strengthens the Standard Model of particle physics and excludes alternative models.” “If we had discovered that the shape wasn’t round, that would be the biggest headline in physics for the past several decades,” said Gerald Gabrielse, who led the research at Northwestern. A slightly squashed charge could have indicated unknown, hard-to-detect heavy particles in the electron’s presence, a discovery that could have upended the global physics community. In a new study, researchers at Northwestern, Harvard and Yale universities examined the shape of an electron’s charge with unprecedented precision to confirm that it is perfectly spherical.
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