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Matter, Anti-Matter, and a New Subatomic Particle?
sciencehabit writes "Physicists may have finally figured out why the universe contains more matter than antimatter. The key lies in a flaw in the relationship between the two and a potentially new subatomic particle. 'Other researchers, however, say the results, published today in Nature, should be interpreted cautiously. It could all be an effect produced by run-of-the-mill particles'."
I think thats a little harsh although has some grounding in reality. It is true that theoretically, there are many many theories out there which predict unobserved particles and one is invented almost every week. The Higgs for example, supersymmetry (SUSY) is another mainstream one. Simply put we have no idea whats going on except that the Standard Model seems to describe it amazingly well. However its incomplete, has many prob such as the baryon asymmetry one being discussed, then the many theories which try to solve these problems and all (or almost all) bring in new particles. This is the scientific method, we do an experiment, we note we dont full understand it and then we hypothesize a theory to explain it. We then test this theory to see if its correct and this is where most of the new theories fall down.
In particle physics right now, the problem is that we have a model, the Standard Model, which we know is incomplete (doesnt include gravity for a start) but it more or less explains every experimental result we've every produced (neutrino masses are argueably accommodated with some small extension). We lack experimental data to even give us a hint what might be beyond it and this has been the case for a long time. So theory has had nothing to do but invent crazy models and wait for the experimentalists to catch up (which we hope to do this year, it'll be exciting). Hence why you see a lot of crazy models around with zero experimental evidence supporting them.
The other problem is that we are all tired and sick of the Standard Model, we want to know whats beyond it so people really really want to find evidence of new physics beyond it. This means that people are quick to jump on small effects and claim its new physics which is probably where you are coming from. Usually they get shouted down by the rest of the quickly community but it does happen with alarming regularity (see pentaquarks, 160 GeV Higgs last year as two recent examples). Whats worse is that for something like the result in the article, its an indirect evidence in a QCD environment which basically means there are so many effects going on, this could easily be explained by the Standard Model. So basically nobody believes it for now. QCD is what binds mesons (such as the B+,B0) and baryons (such as the proton and neutron) together. Unfortunately, we cant solve it right now, except for high energies so often there are many effects which later turn out just because we make a mistake in our approximations in order to get a solution. Compare with the CDF Run I jet excess which later just turned out because QCD effects werent being taken into account. This is the reason that physicists wont believe anything which says new physics right now unless theres a clear unambiguous peak in a mass spectrum, ie make and detect a new particle in your detector. Now this could be genuine evidence but we've all been here before so I think the community takes the feeling that we'll wait for more supporting evidence and for people to offer up alternative explanations before we say its new physics.