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The article https://www.sciencealert.com/physicists-may-have-discovered-new-force-of-nature-in-lhc-experiment speculates that possibly the effect of the fifth (so far unknown) force of nature has been detected during LHC experiments related to studying rates of beauty quarks decaying into electrons and their heavier cousins called muons. Since electrons and muons apparently differ only by their mass (as the article says), could someone explain me why the difference in rates is interpreted in the article as the vestige of the existence of the new (fifth) force of nature and not as another yet unknown property of the gravitational force, which exhibits itself during some elementary particles interactions?

Alex
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    It's also quite possible that there is no fifth force, and rather that gravitation can be focused, like a light can, causing the strength of the interaction to increase. Just a speculation. – shawn_halayka Oct 20 '21 at 23:28
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    @shawn_halayka Do you have mathematics to say that can happen, or just words? – J.G. Oct 21 '21 at 07:06
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    It's a numerical solution: https://github.com/sjhalayka/papers/blob/main/particle/bezier_escape.pdf It's just common sense. – shawn_halayka Oct 21 '21 at 16:46
  • https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.127.161302 – Alex Oct 27 '21 at 13:53

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Particles' masses matter to much more than their coupling to gravity. For example, it can be shown that, beside decay channel counts, we expect an unstable particle's decay lifetime to scale as $1/m^5$, as long as the weak interaction is responsible. In particular, this explains the tau-muon lifetimes ratio. So it's wrong to think gravity would be at work in this recently discussed effect (assuming it's ultimately upheld at $5\sigma$). In fact, gravity between elementary particles is many orders of magnitude too weak to explain it.

J.G.
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  • Are you stating that the nature of gravity is completely known? Why then there is so far no explanation what the dark matter is? – Alex Oct 20 '21 at 21:40
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    @Alex That's not what I'm saying at all. It's just that gravity won't conveniently shoot up orders of magnitude in its coupling constant in just the context you need for your question's premise. We can already determine low-order quantum corrections (see Sec. 8.5 here). – J.G. Oct 20 '21 at 21:51
  • In my view the lack of understanding gravity in one area opens up the possiblity of it's understanding being not complete or even being not correct in other areas... – Alex Oct 20 '21 at 22:49
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    @Alex If we ever have a predictive "gravity explains this big a difference" theory, we'll test it alongside models of quintessence that can already fit an observation like this one (assuming it holds up statistically, of course). – J.G. Oct 20 '21 at 23:03