A New Particle Physics Anomaly in Kaon Decays

The NA62 experiment. Image: CERN

Imagine staring at Loch Ness, scrutinising each dimple in the water, hoping that a monster will emerge. This is basically what particle physicists have done in the past decade, just that the water is data and the dimples are anomalies. The W-Boson anomaly just recently faded away without any monsters appearing, but now, an experiment at CERN called NA62 has observed too many decays of a composite particle called a Kaon. The statistical significance is currently at 3.4σ. The story is the usual one: It’s a deviation from the standard model and if it was true, that could mean new physics. Don’t hold your breath, though. No paper yet, but slides here.

This episode of Science News covers black holes. Physicists are obsessed with black holes, but we still don’t know what’s going on inside of them. One idea is that black holes do not truly exist, but instead they are big quantum objects that have been called fuzzballs or frozen stars. This idea has a big problem. Let’s take a look. You can take the quiz here.

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Tentative Evidence that Dark Matter Interacts with Normal Matter

Illustration of the discrepancy between observation and expectation. Image: Gabriel Pérez

85% of matter in the universe is dark matter, astrophysicists say. Unfortunately, the stuff doesn’t interact with the matter we are made of, and that makes it hard – if not impossible – to catch in a particle detector. A new study from researchers in La Palma now says it might not be entirely hopeless. They analysed the distribution of stars in several dwarf galaxies near us, and say that the stars’ distribution could be better explained if dark matter drags on them, i.e., it interacts after all. The problem is that there are many other ways to explain these observations. It could be that dark matter just isn’t distributed as they think it is, or that it doesn’t exist at all. Press release here. Paper here.

Monday M.A.G.I.C.

The universe expands, now expand your mind with it: My friend and colleague Brian Keating is on a mission to make physics cool again. Mission impossible? Sign up to Brian's weekly newsletter and find out for yourself: https://bit.ly/BrianKeating_Sabine

The Nobel Prize in Physics 2024

This year's Nobel Prize in physics was awarded to John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton for developing the basis of neural networks and artificial intelligence. Well deserved, no doubt, but is it physics? I have a brief comment on this here.

Most Super-Old People are Probably Younger

The lifestyle of people who live longer than 100 years has attracted a lot of research attention. Is it nutrition? Genes? Good friendships? Mental health? Saul Newman from the University of Oxford, U.K., says that much of it is a lack of birth certificates. His analysis reveals that the number of people above the age of 100 dropped with the introduction of birth registrations in the USA, strongly suggesting that many peoples’ ages were simply overestimated. He also noted that their birth dates tend to be divisible by five, a statistical anomaly that suggests the dates were invented. Only about 18% of the allegedly super-old have reasonably reliable birth certificates. None of them live in the USA.  I find it curious that no one thought of asking this question earlier. Maybe we didn’t want to know. Paper here.

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