Nano-Biotechnology

Quantum Physics Gets Weirder by the Day

New Big Bang model may extend standard model

By Gabriel Gache, Science News Editor

17th of January 2008, 14:03 GMT

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A common representation of the Big Bang process

The universe mush have had some kind of beginning no doubt about that, thus the Big Bang model has been proposed as the simplest theory to explain the processes which took place in the first stages of the universe's life. Though physicists can approximate exactly what happed inside the universe just a few fractions of a second after the Big Bang, what was before that remains mostly a mystery. In order to resolve this matter, a new approach, which suggests that each particle in the Standard Model actually might have had a supersymmetric companion, has been recently proposed.

The so-called sparticles are predicted by the supersymmetry theory, which states that each particle has a shadow particle. Thus, during the Big Bang phase each family of elementary particles, leptons, quarks, photon, must have been accompanied by a supersymmetric sparticle, respectively sleptons, squarks, sphotons. Such processes would usually take place during a rapid change in phase in the fabric of space-time, which would only last about one ten of a trillionth of a ten trillionth of a nanosecond before the sparticles would decay and condensate into the particles described in the Standard Model.

Particles are thought to have masses about a thousand time that of their corresponding particles, and energies up to 14 Tera-electron-Volt or more. Such energies are not currently available in traditional particle accelerators, albeit the Large Hadron Collider could be capable of creating such particles. The LHC particle collider is currently under construction and is estimated that it will be able to go online for preliminary test by the end of this year.

Supersymmetry suggests that sparticles masses might be able to stack in about 32 possible combinations, which results in extremely large mass hierarchies. Probabilistic calculations show that just by stacking four sparticle masses can result in about ten thousand different mass hierarchies, and expands to even more while including the rest of the sparticle masses. Though it has been predicted that sparticles cannot currently exist in a free state in the universe, the outcome of stacking all the 32 possible sparticle masses would result in an incredible large number of particle, which could be discovered by the LHC.

The four sparticle mass stacking was suggested in the supergravity model developed in 1982. By studying the signature space of the sixteen patterns at LHC, Pran Nath one of the co-authors of the original mSUGRA theory, suggested ways in which the lowest energy sparticles could be created and successfully detected.

TAGS:

Standard Model | Big Bang | sparticles | LHC | elementary particle

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