American physicists in their work confirmed the possible discovery of the fifth fundamental interaction. The study is published in Physical Review Letters and is briefly reported by the University of California, Irvine, USA.
The work of physicists is devoted to possible interactions of a new particle - the protophobic X-boson. She, according to scientists, enters into reactions only with electrons and neutrons, and is also part of the dark sector of nature. With its help physicists tried to explain the anomaly observed in the experiment during the transition to the ground energy state of beryllium-8.
The feature was first noticed by Hungarian physicists, who considered it evidence of the existence of a hypothetical particle participating in the fifth interaction - a dark photon with a mass of 17 megaelectronvolts.
American scientists confirmed the existence of the anomaly in an article published in April 2015, and then offered another explanation for it. The new protophobic X-boson, according to physicists, explains a number of experiments in which the anomalous magnetic moment of the muon is observed.
Currently, four fundamental interactions are known: strong, weak, gravitational and electromagnetic. With the fifth interaction, scientists connect dark matter - a hypothetical substance that manifests itself only in gravitational interaction.
"If future experiments confirm the discovery of the fifth force, it will completely change our understanding of the universe and will have implications for the unification of interactions and dark matter," said the lead of the new study, Jonathan Feng.