FOOTBALLS failed, but apples could do the trick. Our universe could contain microscopic extra dimensions of space 鈥� shaped like apples. These extra dimensions could solve a mystery about fundamental particles.
Merab Gogberashvili at the Andronikashvili Institute of Physics in Tbilisi, Georgia, and colleagues were wondering why fundamental particles always come in threes. Electrons, muons and tau particles are very similar, differing only in their mass 鈥� forming three 鈥済enerations鈥� of a family. Neutrinos and quarks can also be grouped by mass into three generations.
In fact this could be an illusion, says Gogberashvili. What appears to be a family of particles may in fact be just one kind of particle taking three different routes through extra dimensions. The team studied a number of different 鈥渟hapes鈥� for the extra dimensions, including soccer and rugby balls, but found that only apples solved the problem 鈥� because their surface changes from concave to convex. The team鈥檚 calculations show that an electron can appear to have the mass of a muon or a tau particle depending on the route it takes around the apple. The same effect explains quark and neutrino generations too (Journal of High Energy Physics, ).
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Gogberashvili says he may be able to test his theory at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, the European particle physics lab near Geneva, Switzerland. 鈥淏ut of course the first step is to see if extra dimensions exist at all.鈥�
