Possible new particle hints that universe may not be left-handed
Mirroring the universe (Image: Claudia Marcelloni/CERN) PHYSICS may be shifting to the right. Tantalising signals at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider near Geneva, Switzerland, hint at a new particle that could end 50 years of thinking that nature discriminates between left and right-handed particles . Like your hands, some fundamental particles are different from their mirror images, and so have an intrinsic handedness or “chirality”. But some particles only seem to come in one of the two handedness options, leading to what’s called “left-right symmetry breaking”. In particular, W bosons, which carry the weak nuclear force, are supposed to come only in left-handed varieties. The debris from smashing protons at the LHC has revealed evidence of unexpected right-handed bosons. After finding the Higgs boson in 2012, the collider shut down for upgrades, allowing collisions to resume at higher energies earlier this year. At two of the LHC’s experiments, the latest results appear to ...