What If Electrons Aren't Round? The Antimatter Problem - EXPLAINED

this video is brought to you by Squarespace how round is an electron we've always thought of them as pointlike particles but are they really what if they're more oval or Square well actually that might change everything we know about the universe the Big Bang the moment an infinitely hot and dense single point inflated at unimaginable speeds to produce the beginnings of our Cosmos should have created equal amounts of matter and its counterpart antimatter a material that when it comes in contact with matter annihilates it leaving behind Just Energy if the universe had been perfectly symmetric equal amounts of matter and antimatter created then there would be nothing left but light so why do we still see matter in our universe the answer might come from the electron if it isn't perfectly round like we assumed if it has a slight North and South Pole this small effect might be the answer physicists are looking for so the question becomes can the shape of an electron change the universe the existence of antimatter particles was first predicted by Paul dur a British physicist born in Bristol shout out to Bristol we also made Banky and pirate accents but what actually is antimatter in theory every particle of matter we see around us should have an antimatter companion an anti-particle that is virtually identical to itself but with the opposite charge for protons there exists an antiproton for neutrons the anti- neutron and for electrons the anti- electron more usually called the itron we know antimatter exists because we've been able to create it in particle accelerators and study its properties everything we know about the universe so far suggests that at the Big Bang matter and antimatter should have been created in equal amounts but somehow processes favored matter over antimatter in physics we call this symmetry breaking where the universe doesn't look the same from all angles specifically this is a type of symmetry breaking called CP violation where in reverse order P stands for for parity a measure of spatial symmetry heavily simplified if you look at a mirror copy of the universe the way things behave shouldn't change other than moving left looks like moving right but particles shouldn't suddenly move away from Gravity where previously they mooved towards it and C stands for charge flipping the charge of something shouldn't make it behave fundamentally differently yes in an electric field different charges should head in different directions but that's accounted for by the sign of the charge what it shouldn't do is cause the particles to disappear from EX distance which is What's Happening Here we do see some places in the universe where CP symmetry is violated but nothing sufficient to say why antimatter shouldn't exist in the universe at all which either means that the Universe behaved differently in the beginning or that we don't quite see the subtle things that are breaking this symmetry just yet researchers at CERN have even begun testing things we were pretty sure about but just wanted to double check that antimatter and matter both fall down when pulled by gravity this was hard to do because the gravitational force is is so weak compared to the other three known forces of nature and scientists have struggled to preserve antimatter without it annihilating with matter for a long enough time to carry out these experiments the study published in nature used anti-hydrogen atoms an anti-proton and an anti-electron put together which were Co to half a degree above absolute zero and were then confined in a 25 cm long magnetic bottle with an opening at the top and the Bottom by measuring the annihilation event ratees which produces flashes of light at each end of the tube measurements showed that the antimatter was more likely to escape and meet its Annihilation at the bottom of the bottle due to gravitational forces this showed that matter and antimatter both Fall Down Under gravity and indicates pretty disappointingly that anti-gravity probably doesn't exist in the words of one of the researchers it has taken us 30 years to learn how to make an anti- atom hold on to it and to control it well enough that we could drop it in a way that it would be sensitive to the force of gravity and it turns out out this isn't where the anti- Symmetry is hiding so our attention turns back to the electron one theory is that this symmetry is broken by a small asymmetry hiding for us at the electron level in the standard model of particle physics which describes the behavior of fundamental particles and their interactions it predicts that the electron should be perfectly round theories such as super symmetry however assume that the charge distribution an electron is ever so slightly lopsided giving the electron a more washed or egg shape enough to break the symmetry of the universe and explain why we don't see antimatter there are a lot of physicists at the moment who would bet that the electron is not perfectly round however so far no measurement we have ever conducted has been precise enough to say with certainty either way the technical term for this is the electric dipole moment if the electron is completely round with the charge spread exactly evenly between the two poles then scientists would say it has an electric dipole moment of zero so even a modestly larger observed value finding the electron is any way more egg-shaped than pointlike could point us in the direction on why the universe exists as we observe it by this point you've probably realized that electrons are really important so look after your internet electrons today with our sponsor Squarespace I've been using Squarespace for about 6 years and I genuinely love how intuitive and reliable it is whether I'm doing something like building a new venture or supporting a portfolio company to communicate the value proposition of their sign to a wider audience Squarespace has always been my go-to platform Squarespace offers an incredible 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purchase of a website or domain using the code Dr Ben miles thank you Squarespace for existing now back to the video so the question is how do you measure the roundness of an electron in search for those answers in research published in the Journal of Science by scientists from the University of Colorado Boulder and the National Institute of Standards and Technology researchers developed a new method to measure the electric dipole moment of the electron to the most accurate level ever examined to put the technique in comparison if the electron was scaled up to the size of the Earth it would be capable of measuring any deviation from perfect roundness down to the size of an atom and how they did that was pretty clever in their system the researchers trapped hafnium fluoride ions in spinning electric Fields haum fluoride was selected due to its particular electronic structure and the large internal electric field that it possesses making it highly sensitive to the presence of an electron's electric dipole moment in an applied electric field e if the electron isn't round if it has a slight dipole moment indicated here by the arrow then our system would have four possible energy states both the ion and the electron are aligned with the field the ion is aligned but the electron is anti-aligned or the ion is anti-aligned but the electron is aligned or both the ion and the electron are anti-aligned if we find any difference in the energy levels of these systems that will tell us that the electron has a dipole moment if we find no difference in the energy levels that tells us our four state system was really only a two-state system because the electron field contribution was equal to zero to take the measurement ions in these configurations are prepared in a chamber and the electric field is applied and made to rotate to keep the ions aligned with the field by firing a laser at the ions through a process called Ramen spectroscopy essentially listening to the energy levels of the returning photons that reflect off these ions and seeing if they come back with more or less energy than the light that was sent into the system the energy levels of the ions can be determined after collecting 620 hours of data over about 2 months corresponding to 100 million detection events they obtained a value for the electron's electronic dipole moment of 1 * 10 Theus 30 that's 30 Z then a one at the end which they say is consistent with zero to within one standard error they concluded that the electron was perfectly round at least to about 2.5 times greater sensitivity than any other experiment previously performed but what does this actually mean for physics and why don't we see antimatter and why do we see so much Focus for these experiments on electrons what if protons or neutrons are the cause of this anti- symmetry as protons and neutrons are made from smaller fundamental particles called quarks you might reasonably assume that they have a bit more inherent lumpiness in their shape and distribution protons two up quarks of 2/3 charge and one down Quark of minus 1/3 charge giving an overall charge of plus one and neutrons one up Quark of 2/3 charge and two down quarks of minus 1/3 charge giving an overall charge of zero often when we go to make a representation of a proton or a neutron and the quarks held within we draw these three quarks held closely together so surely there's only so round or evenly distributed the charge of one of these objects could possibly be but much like for the electron if we really did see any Divergence or symmetry breaking or a proton or Neutron's electric dipole moment this would also point to physics outside of the standard model and as of yet for experiments that we have run on these systems all of them have pointed to perfectly round particles at least within the ranges of error detection so what's happening here how do we tie together clear differences in antimatter and matter and yet no deviations from perfect roundness in our particles there are several other possible ways for symmetry to be broken in the universe I don't want to cover them here that's for a different video if you're interested I want to ask a kind of strange question what if we aren't looking close enough in Quantum electrodynamics the vacuum isn't just empty space instead it can be thought of as a CA of virtual particle anti-particle pairs that constantly pop in and out of existence when a charged particle like an electron moves through this vacuum it can polarize these virtual pairs for example a virtual elron positron pair might momentarily pop into existence with the virtual electron being attracted to the real charged particle and the virtual positron being repelled this polarization of the vacuum essentially creates a charge screen around a particle this makes the effective charge of an electron appear different at varying distances at Short distances very close to the electron one can see more of the bare charge of the electron but at larger distances the effects of the virtual particles start to average out and one sees a different screened charge due to all these virtual particle effects this effect might also have some influence on the roundness of an electron as virtual electron positron pairs redistribute to Shield any perceived asymmetry in the electron charge for now we have results that show absolutely no trace of any hidden Dynamics leaving us with an unsolved mystery of how matter gained the upper hand over antimatter in the universe so for now all we know is there is still deeper to explore hey guys thanks very much for watching the video I hope you enjoyed it if you did please give us a thumbs up subscribe if you are new to the channel and otherwise have a fantastic day I will see you next time goodbye

Channel: Dr Ben Miles

Views: 35,154

Keywords: science, future, breakthrough

Id: kfg6bzj1WXk

Length: 12min 16sec (736 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 31 2023