The Muon is an elementary particle. Like the electron, it possesses one unit of negative charge. But it is 200 times more massive than an electron. We don't find them anywhere except in our particle colliders, they just don't seem to "happen" in nature. (only three of the 13 known particles show up in every day nature: electrons, up quarks and down quarks. That's it. Those three particles make up everything, including us.) Even though Muons don't show up in nature, we know how to make them. And we do, and use them in experiments.
Since the Muon has a negative charge, it responds to electromagnetic fields it encounters. In one experiment, Muons were shot through a magnetic field, to see if they "wobbled" as theory predicted they should. (Yes, we can detect and measure that wobble!)
99% of them behaved exactly as the theory predicted. But 1% of them wobbled more than they should have.
This is a big deal in quantum mechanics, because in the QM world, particles have to behave in certain ways, with nothing in between. If you add more energy to an electron, it has to be a certain minimum amount before the electron shows any difference. And once you stop adding energy to it, it has to spit it out and fall back to it's minimum energy level. So it spits it out as a photon, and that photon is always the exact same value of energy. This sort of thing has been tested a lot in the near century of QM has been around. It is, among other things, one of the principles that allows us to make lasers, among many, many, other things.
This makes the Muon excess wobble twice as unusual: that most of them behave as predicted, but some of them don't. Why? What's going on? What does it mean? Remember there was no use for Special and General Relativity when Einstein thought them up, and no way to "prove" them. Now we use them to go to space, and operate our GPS satellites, among a million other things.
And at this point it may all still be a mistake in the experiment, how the results are interpreted, or the theory. They're digging away like mad on it.
Since the Muon has a negative charge, it responds to electromagnetic fields it encounters. In one experiment, Muons were shot through a magnetic field, to see if they "wobbled" as theory predicted they should. (Yes, we can detect and measure that wobble!)
99% of them behaved exactly as the theory predicted. But 1% of them wobbled more than they should have.
This is a big deal in quantum mechanics, because in the QM world, particles have to behave in certain ways, with nothing in between. If you add more energy to an electron, it has to be a certain minimum amount before the electron shows any difference. And once you stop adding energy to it, it has to spit it out and fall back to it's minimum energy level. So it spits it out as a photon, and that photon is always the exact same value of energy. This sort of thing has been tested a lot in the near century of QM has been around. It is, among other things, one of the principles that allows us to make lasers, among many, many, other things.
This makes the Muon excess wobble twice as unusual: that most of them behave as predicted, but some of them don't. Why? What's going on? What does it mean? Remember there was no use for Special and General Relativity when Einstein thought them up, and no way to "prove" them. Now we use them to go to space, and operate our GPS satellites, among a million other things.
And at this point it may all still be a mistake in the experiment, how the results are interpreted, or the theory. They're digging away like mad on it.
