The most accurate measurement yet of the shape of the electron has shown it to be almost perfectly spherical.
Electrons, negatively-charged particles which orbit the nuclei, deviates from absolute roundness by less than less than 0.000000000000000000000000001cm.
This means that if it was magnified to the size of the solar system, it would still appear spherical to within the width of a human hair.
The discovery is important because it may make some of the emerging theories of particle physics - such as supersymmetry - less likely. The research, by a team at Imperial College London, is published in the latest edition of Nature journal.
In their scientific paper, the researchers say the electron differs from being perfectly round by a minuscule amount.
"Conventionally, people think that the electron is round like a little ball. But some advanced theories of physics speculate that it's not round, and so what we've done is designed an experiment to check with a very, very high degree of precision," said lead author Jony Hudson, from Imperial.
The current best theory to explain the interactions of sub-atomic particles is known as the Standard Model. According to this framework, the electron should be close to perfectly spherical.
But the Standard Model is incomplete. It does not explain how gravity works and fails to explain other phenomena observed in the Universe.
So physicists have tried to build on this model. One framework to explain physics beyond the Standard Model is known as supersymmetry.
However, this theory predicts that the electron has a more distorted shape than that suggested by the Standard Model. According to this idea, the particle could be egg-shaped.
Electrons, negatively-charged particles which orbit the nuclei, deviates from absolute roundness by less than less than 0.000000000000000000000000001cm.
This means that if it was magnified to the size of the solar system, it would still appear spherical to within the width of a human hair.
The discovery is important because it may make some of the emerging theories of particle physics - such as supersymmetry - less likely. The research, by a team at Imperial College London, is published in the latest edition of Nature journal.
In their scientific paper, the researchers say the electron differs from being perfectly round by a minuscule amount.
"Conventionally, people think that the electron is round like a little ball. But some advanced theories of physics speculate that it's not round, and so what we've done is designed an experiment to check with a very, very high degree of precision," said lead author Jony Hudson, from Imperial.
The current best theory to explain the interactions of sub-atomic particles is known as the Standard Model. According to this framework, the electron should be close to perfectly spherical.
But the Standard Model is incomplete. It does not explain how gravity works and fails to explain other phenomena observed in the Universe.
So physicists have tried to build on this model. One framework to explain physics beyond the Standard Model is known as supersymmetry.
However, this theory predicts that the electron has a more distorted shape than that suggested by the Standard Model. According to this idea, the particle could be egg-shaped.
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