Breaking the Symmetry Between Fundamental Forces

Scientists improve our understanding of the relationship between fundamental forces by re-creating the earliest moments of the universe.

Image courtesy of Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory

The Science

A fraction of a second after the Big Bang, a single unified force may have shattered. Scientists from the CDF and DZero Collaborations used data from the Fermilab Tevatron Collider to re-create the early universe conditions. They measured the weak mixing angle that controls the breaking of the unified force. Measuring this angle, a key parameter of the standard model, improves our understanding of the universe. The details of this symmetry breaking affect the nature of stars, atoms, and quarks. The new measurement of the weak mixing angle helps cement our understanding of the past, the character of what we observe today, and what we believe is in store for our future.

The Impact

Previous determinations of the weak mixing angle from around the world disagreed. This allowed for the possibility that maybe there are new fundamental particles to be discovered. Or maybe there was a misunderstanding in how we think about the fundamental forces. This new combined result helps to resolve the discrepancy and reinforces our standard theory of the fundamental forces.

Summary

At present, scientists think that at the highest energies and earliest moments in time, all the fundamental forces may have existed as a single unified force. As the universe cooled just one microsecond after the Big Bang, it underwent a “phase transition” that transformed or “broke” the unified electromagnetic and weak forces into the distinct forces observed today.

The phase transition is similar to the transformation of water into ice. In this familiar case, we call the transition a change in a state of matter. In the early universe case, we call the transition “electroweak symmetry breaking.“

In the same way that we characterize the water-to-ice phase transition as occurring when the temperature drops below 32 degrees, we characterize the amount of electroweak symmetry breaking with a parameter called the weak mixing angle, whose value has been measured by multiple experiments over the years.

By re-creating the early universe conditions in accelerator experiments, we have observed this transition and can measure the weak mixing angle that controls it. Our best understanding of the electroweak symmetry breaking involves the Higgs mechanism, and the Nobel Prize-winning Higgs boson discovery in 2012 was a milestone in our understanding.

For two decades, the most precise measurements of the weak mixing angle came from experiments that collided electrons and positrons at the European laboratory CERN and SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in California, each of which gave different answers. Their results have been puzzling because the probability that the two measurements agree was less than one part in a thousand, suggesting the possibility of new phenomena—physics beyond the standard model. More input was needed.

Although the environment in Fermilab's proton-antiproton Tevatron Collider was much harsher than either CERN’s or SLAC's collider, with many more background particles, the large and well-understood data sets of the Tevatron's CDF and DZero experiments allowed a new combined measurement that gives almost the same precision as that from electron-positron collisions. The new result lies about midway between the CERN and SLAC measurements and thus is in good agreement with both of them, as well as with the average of all previous direct and indirect measurements of weak mixing angle. Thus, Occam’s razor suggests that those new particles and forces are not yet necessary to explain our observations and that our present particle physics and cosmology models remain good descriptors of the observed universe.

Contact

Giorgio Chiarelli
INFN Pisa
[email protected]

Dmitri Denisov
Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory
[email protected]

Paul Grannis
Stony Brook University
[email protected]

David Toback
Texas A&M University
[email protected]

Funding

This work was supported by the Department of Energy, Office of Science, Office of High Energy Physics and the National Science Foundation (United States); the Australian Research Council; the Carlos Chagas Filho Foundation for the Support of Research (Brazil); the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (Canada); the Academy of Sciences, the National Natural Science Foundation, and the National Science Council (China); the Administrative Department of Science, Technology and Innovation (Colombia); the Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports (Czech Republic); the Academy of Finland; the Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission and the National Center for Scientific Research/National Institute of Nuclear and Particle Physics (France); the Federal Ministry of Education and Research and the German Research Foundation (Germany); the Department of Atomic Energy and Department of Science and Technology (India); the Science Foundation (Ireland); the National Institute for Nuclear Physics (Italy); the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (Japan); the Korean World Class University Program and the National Research Foundation (Korea); the National Council of Science and Technology (Mexico); the Foundation for Fundamental Research on Matter (The Netherlands); the Ministry of Education and Science of the Russian Federation, the National Research Center “Kurchatov Institute” of the Russian Federation, and the Russian Foundation for Basic Research; the Slovak Research and Development Agency; the Ministry of Science and Innovation, and the Consolider-Ingenio 2010 Program (Spain); the Swedish Research Council; the Swiss National Science Foundation; the Ministry of Education and Science of Ukraine; the Science and Technology Facilities Council and The Royal Society (United Kingdom); the A.P. Sloan Foundation (United States); and the European Union community Marie Curie Fellowship. Research was done at the Fermilab Accelerator Complex, a Department of Energy Office of Science user facility.

Publications

T. Aaltonen, et al., (CDF and D0 Collaborations), “Tevatron Run II combination of the effective leptonic electroweak mixing angle.” Physical Review D 97, 112007 (2018). [DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevD.97.112007]