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These 5 particles are so strange that we’re not sure they exist

Pabio December 24, 2024

What makes up the matter we perceive in the universe?

For starters, there are the usual suspects, like electrons, protons, quarks And neutrinos. But if these particles don’t seem strange enough to you, I’m here to help.

There are other particles that are so rare that we are not even sure they exist. Here are five of the strangest and rarest hypothetical particles in the universe.

Dark photon

Everyone loves photon. It gets along with so many other particles. Its scope is infinite. This makes flashlights work. But it may not be the only type of photon in existence. Enter the dark photon, which is like a regular photon but just…dark.

The motivation of the dark photon comes from the mysteries of dark matter And dark energy. Dark matter is an invisible form of matter that makes up most of the mass of almost all galaxies and, in total, accounts for about 25% of the energy in the universe. Dark energy is responsible for the accelerated expansion of the universe and represents 70% of the content of the cosmos.

Among the many questions cosmologists face is how simple or complex these dark components are. We know that ordinary matter is fascinatingly complex, with a wide variety of particles and forces at play. Is the dark sector, as it is called, big, simple and stupid, or is it also rich and varied than the light side of the universe?

If the dark sector is complex, there may be forces of nature which operate only between dark matter and/or dark energy, and dark photons would be the carriers of these forces. No research has yet uncovered evidence of dark photons, but we still have much to learn.

Curvature

Let’s go back to the first moments of Big Bang. Cosmologists believe that our universe has experienced a period of incredibly rapid expansion known as inflation. This event was caused by a mysterious substance in the universe known as “inflaton” (which basically looked like dark energy on steroids).

Inflation is still hypothetical, but it has a powerful prediction under its belt: cosmic structure. The statistical properties of the structures of our universe match what we expect from cosmic inflation. We therefore believe that this dramatic event laid the foundations for cosmic inflation. stars, galaxies and clusters that would emerge later.

Despite this success, inflation still faces thorny problems. On the one hand, it is difficult to construct inflation models that are “natural” – in the sense that they begin and end without any fine-tuning – while still generating the seeds of cosmic structure. To get around this problem, some theorists have proposed a companion to the inflaton, called the curvaton.

The curve’s job is to sit back and wait for inflation to do its job. Then the curvature comes in and lays the foundation for the structure. The advantage of this approach is that inflation models can be more “natural” because we are not forcing a single entity – inflation – to do all the work in the early universe.

The downside of this approach is that we are replacing one hypothetical entity with two, which doesn’t really allay concerns that we may be wrong about the overall inflation picture. But curvature is still worth studying, because research in this direction could open a promising avenue. Plus, it has a really cool name.

Glue ball

The carrier of the strong force is a particle known as gluonof which there are nine varieties.

Here’s the fun thing about gluons: They can also feel a powerful force. So our best models of the proton tell us that gluons are hot clusters of strong force interactions. And these are not the only damages caused by strong force interactions. Protons and neutrons have three quarks (and gluons), and there is a whole family of particles called mesons, which contain two quarks (and gluons).

So we have all these combinations of quarks and gluons held together by the powerful nuclear force. But if gluons feel the strong nuclear force anyway, why not just ignore the quarks part? Why make things so complicated? Keep it simple. And that’s how we created the glueball, which is a large particle made up of nothing more than a bunch of gluons… stuck together.

three points of light connected by rays of light inside a transparent bubble

An illustration of gluons holding another particle together. (Image credit: Sefa kart/Getty Images)

What makes the gooball so elusive is that it is incredibly fleeting, with a lifespan of less than a microsecond. This isn’t so surprising; any combination of quarks and gluons, except the proton, is also unstable in isolation. But the gooballs are expected to have an exceptionally short lifespan; otherwise, we would have already seen them floating in our gardens.

But the glueballs also predicted masses in the range of almost all other composite particles. So we can do it without realizing it, because when we see a surprising new particle in a collider, we can usually only quantify its mass. That means we’ve seen plenty of potential gooballs since 2013, but what we saw could also be other, much less exotic particles.

Nowadays there are whole experiments, like ColleXdedicated to the search for gooballs. This is the last big prediction of the Standard model still standing, so it’s worth looking out for these strange particles.

X17

We’ve been trying to move beyond the standard model of particle physics since we invented it. And in 2015, physicists received a signal that something was wrong, at ATOMKI, the Hungarian Institute for Nuclear Research.

The team had assembled a device to search for dark photons. The setup involved firing protons at lithium-7, which then turned into beryllium-8 nuclei, which then decayed and produced pairs of electrons and positrons. These pairs flew at different angles, and scientists used nuclear physics calculations to predict how these angles would propagate. If they got more of these particles than expected, it may be because dark photons were involved.

Indeed, the Hungarian team discovered additional electrons and positrons. To recreate the signal, a new particle with a mass of 17 MeV (34 times the mass of the electron) was needed, which is why this mysterious new particle was given a name: X17.

Over the following years, the Hungarian team built up an impressive list of achievements, all of which demonstrate the reality of this new particle, including statistical significance above 6 sigma, and worked with collaborators to find similar signals.

However, most leading physicists have doubts about X17. All “independent” confirmations carry some sort of fingerprint of the original Hungarian team, and no one outside of that network has been able to replicate this effect.

Furthermore, there are relatively plausible explanations for the anomaly resulting from the geometry of the detector setup. Since we don’t see any new evidence for the particle, as much as I’d like X17 to exist, I’m not going to get my hopes up just yet.

Preon

You have your elements, like helium and aluminum. They are made up of fundamental particles, such as the proton, neutron and electron. But these are made up of even smaller things: quarks. So why stop there? Perhaps what we call the fundamental particles of the universe are actually composite structures of even smaller objects, preons (as in “pre-quarks”, not to be confused with prions.

One of the main motivations for preons is that many particles are extremely similar to each other but differ only minimally. For example, the electron and positron differ only in their charge, while the electron and muon differ only in their mass. We currently have no explanation for these almost identical properties, so we think they could result from other interactions.

Preons have been proposed to explain… well, almost every outstanding problem in the Standard Model, from why there are only three generations to what dark matter is. But nothing ever seems to hold, and that’s because no experiment has given any indication that quarks and leptons are composite particles. We try as much as possible to break them, but they continue to be themselves.

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