A Tiny Particle Flip Could Reveal New Laws of the Universe
A Tiny Particle Flip Could Reveal New Laws of the Universe A major international research effort led by scientists at Sun Yat-sen University and the Institute of Modern Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences is behind a new experiment called MACE. The goal is to investigate whether muonium, a short-lived system made of a positive muon and an electron, can spontaneously convert into antimuonium, its antimatter counterpart. According to current physics theory, such a change should never occur. Detecting it would signal a breakdown of lepton flavor conservation, a core principle of the Standard Model of particle physics, and would provide direct evidence of physics beyond today’s framework. “The conversion of muonium to antimuonium represents a clean and unique probe of new physics in the leptonic sector,” explains the research team. “Unlike other charged lepton flavor violation processes, this conversion is sensitive to ∆Lℓ = 2 models that are fundamentally distinct and could re...