The only way to discover some of the rules is by looking for hidden patterns in the lengthy calculations. Some of these rules follow from known physical or mathematical principles, but others seem arbitrary. Like the genetic code, the “DNA of particle scattering,” as he calls it, has rules about which combinations of words are allowed. The six letters make up words, and the words combine to form terms in each scattering amplitude.ĭixon compares this new scheme to the genetic code, in which four chemical building blocks combine to form the genes in a strand of DNA. The six basic elements of the new structure, called “letters,” are variables representing combinations of each particle’s energy and momentum. They realized that many of the complicated expressions in an amplitude calculation could be eliminated by reorganizing everything into a new structure. In 2010, these cumbersome calculations were circumvented by four researchers, including Volovich, who found a shortcut. Traditionally, you must add up the probability of each possible middle event, taking them one at a time. You know the beginning and the end of the story (two gluons become four), but you also need to know the middle - including all the particles that can temporarily pop in and out of existence, thanks to quantum uncertainty. Typically, to figure out the probability of two high-energy gluons scattering to produce four lower-energy gluons, for example, you must consider all the possible pathways that might yield this outcome. “This is a magnificent discovery because it is totally unexpected,” said Anastasia Volovich, a particle physicist at Brown University, “and there is still no explanation of why it should be true.” The DNA of Particle Scatteringĭixon and his team discovered the antipodal duality by using a special “code” to compute scattering amplitudes more efficiently than they could with traditional methods. Researchers hope that investigating the strange finding could help them make new connections between seemingly unrelated aspects of particle physics. While this duality arises in a simplified theory of gluons and other particles that does not quite describe our universe, there are clues that a similar duality might hold in the real world. Now, the antipodal duality, as the researchers are calling it, has been confirmed for high-precision calculations involving 93 million terms. By the end of the call, having calculated thousands of terms that kept agreeing, the physicists were pretty certain they were dealing with a new duality - a hidden connection between two different phenomena that couldn’t be explained by our current understanding of physics. They started calculating the two amplitudes at progressively higher levels of precision (the greater the precision, the more terms they had to compare). Knowing of no reason the two scattering amplitudes should correspond, the group thought perhaps it was a coincidence. The research is conducted through MIT’s Laboratory for Nuclear Science (LNS).He shared his observation with his collaborators over Zoom. Insight into these questions stem from a suite of different nuclear and particle experiments that span throughout the globe, from across the United States, Asia and Europe, to Antarctica and the very depths of space. What are the properties of elementary particles in the cosmos?.
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