Scientists have picked up signals from the smallest scale of nature ever explored, about 100 billion times smaller than an atom, a realm some physicists have nicknamed the "zeptoverse," the BBC reported. The work, led by researchers based in Cambridge, comes from an experiment at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, on the Swiss-French border, which smashes particles together to see what is inside them. The result matters, the BBC said, because it could help researchers develop a more complete theory of how the universe works.
Dark matter makes up a large part of the cosmos, but it has remained invisible except through its gravitational effect on ordinary matter. In this experiment, scientists studied the "shrapnel" of high-energy collisions, including a subatomic particle called a beauty quark. The particle is unstable and exists for just one and a half trillionths of a second before decaying. Despite that short lifetime, researchers detected it interacting with other tiny particles at a scale of a billion-trillionth of a meter. Some theories suggest that at these scales, particles are more sensitive to dark matter, which could influence how the quarks interact and break down. Detecting activity in that tiny world, they argue, could help in the search for dark matter.
"We're knocking on the door of this zeptoverse," Dr. Harry Cliff of Cambridge University, who led the analysis, told BBC News. He said the subatomic measurements gave researchers a "ringside seat" to the behavior of possible new particles. "And what we want to do now is go in and explore and find what new particles are waiting there. And to do that, what we need is more data." The 28 countries involved in the project have agreed a £150 million upgrade to the LHCb detector, which would increase the frequency of these decays tenfold. "With that we can probe inside the zeptoverse and see what's waiting," Cliff said.
Last year, however, UK Research and Innovation, the government body in charge of research funding, announced that it was withdrawing its share of the money for the planned upgrade, and later announced cuts to several other particle physics and astronomy projects, including Jodrell Bank's Lovell telescope. Prof. Tim Gershon, who leads the LHCb international collaboration, told BBC News that the United Kingdom's full involvement would be in doubt. "The UK is at risk of not being involved and making really major discoveries," he said, adding that the longer-term cost was to training young researchers. Dr. Mary Richardson-Slipper, part of the team that made the discovery, said she is looking at jobs abroad. "Lots" of fellow researchers in fundamental physics had already moved, she said. UKRI told the BBC it remains a fully engaged member of CERN as its second-largest funder, at around £175 million a year, and that it had more applications than it could support. Prof. Brian Cox, a Manchester particle researcher not on the team, called the result "important" and said it "would be extraordinary to walk away from UK scientific leadership at this moment." The verified physics result is a new reach in scale. The policy fight is about whether Britain stays in the next step.