Scientists have detected signals from the smallest scale of nature ever explored — 100 billion times smaller than an atom, a realm some physicists have nicknamed the zeptoverse, BBC News reported.
The result, led by researchers based in Cambridge, came from an experiment at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, on the Swiss-French border, which smashes particles together to study what is inside them. The work matters, the BBC said, because it could help researchers develop a more complete theory of how the universe works, including a better look at dark matter, which is inferred from gravity but has otherwise remained invisible.
In the experiment, scientists studied the "shrapnel" of high-energy collisions, including a subatomic particle called a beauty quark, which exists for about 1.5 trillionths of a second before decaying. Despite that brief lifetime, researchers detected it interacting with other particles at a scale of a billion-trillionth of a metre. Some theories suggest particles at those scales may be more sensitive to dark matter. "We're knocking on the door of this zeptoverse," said Dr. Harry Cliff of Cambridge University, who led the data analysis. "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."
A planned upgrade, and a British funding fight
The 28 countries in the project have agreed a £150 million upgrade to the LHCb detector that would increase the frequency of these decays tenfold. "With that we can probe inside the zeptoverse and see what's waiting," Cliff said. But last year, UK Research and Innovation, the government funding agency, announced it was withdrawing its share of the upgrade money, and later cut several other particle-physics and astronomy projects, including work tied to Jodrell Bank's Lovell Telescope. Prof. Tim Gershon, who leads the international LHCb collaboration, told the BBC that the United Kingdom's full involvement is now in doubt. "The UK is at risk of not being involved and making really major discoveries," he said, and that the deeper loss would be in training young researchers. Dr. Mary Richardson-Slipper, part of the team behind the result, said she is looking at jobs abroad. "Lots" of colleagues in fundamental physics have already moved, she said.
The cuts came even as the overall science budget rose. Prof. Brian Cox, a University of Manchester particle researcher and television presenter who was not part of the team, called the result "important" and said it "would be extraordinary to walk away from UK scientific leadership at this moment." UKRI told the BBC it remains a fully engaged CERN member and its second-largest funder, at about £175 million a year, and that it had "more exciting applications for funding than we were able to support," choosing instead some projects in clean energy, medical imaging and cultural heritage. Those are competing budget claims, not a settled judgment about the experiment's future.