Jay Tasson recognized for groundbreaking physics research with Carleton students
Tasson is associate professor of physics at Carleton.
Jay Tasson, associate professor of physics, was featured by the New Scientist in a piece titled, “Huge progress made in attempt to upgrade standard model of particles.”
A challenging mathematical effort undertaken by a team of undergraduates has put bounds on a promising set of ways to break and upgrade the standard model of particle physics.
Finding the next big theory of everything will require updating our current best model of all existing particles and forces. Researchers just put new bounds on 132 possible ways to do that update, opening a door to new experiments at the frontier of known physics.
In the 1900s, physicist Hendrik Lorentz argued that experiments involving electric charges must look the same in all frames of reference. This means such experiments taking place in a room ought to give the same result whether the room is stationary, is moving at constant speed or has been rotated through some angle, such as during Earth’s rotation about its axis.
Albert Einstein later built this idea into his theory of special relativity. This eventually cemented the place of “Lorentz symmetry” in the standard model of particle physics, which is currently our best explanation for the behaviour of all known particles and forces other than gravity.
But we now know of phenomena that the standard model fails to fully explain, such as dark matter and dark energy. This has sent researchers looking for ways to upgrade or amend it.
One possible path towards a new model starts with looking for novel quantum fields that violate Lorentz’s argument. Researchers tabulated all such theoretical candidates in the late 1990s, in what is known as the standard model extension (SME), identifying the 132 that were most likely to appear in near-term experiments. Now, for the first time, Jay Tasson at Carleton College in Minnesota and his colleagues have calculated just how precisely researchers ought to look for every single one of those 132 candidates.
Tasson says that searching for Lorentz violations is akin to identifying some special direction in the universe such that moving in this direction or rotating through it changes the outcome of an experiment. This would be similar to noticing that a pencil that usually falls to the ground when placed against the vertical surface of your palm in fact remains in contact with your hand when you move in a particular direction, because of the influence of some new force.
If such a direction is discovered, it would strongly hint that subatomic particles are interacting with a previously unknown quantum field – an entity that extends through all space and interacts with nearby objects, similar to the electromagnetic fields that fill our homes.