What are the odds that muons are more sensitive to neutrino interaction and this is what the scientists are seeing? Muons are pretty massive, after all, and neutrinos are literally everywhere. Obligatory: "billions of neutrinos pass through you every second".
Muons are leptons like neutrinos and their electron cousins, and we already know that electrons can be boosted by the occasional neutrino interaction. A free muon in a magnetic field has nowhere to be boosted to, so, coupled with a hypothetically higher chance of interacting with a neutrino, I'd expect something to happen when it does, though not exactly what.
I figure we don't already use muons in neutrino detectors because they don't last very long (about a second) before decaying, and the only way to get them to last longer is to accelerate them to a decent fraction of the speed of light. That way, from our reference frame they can last minutes or more. That's going to be energy-hungry compared to the passive detectors we have.
i.e. the passive detectors which take advantage of the aforementioned electron / atom interaction.
Interesting. I never expected a fifth. If anything, I've seen a push for reducing the number down to three (gravity, strong and electro-weak) or possibly just two.
Not all decays are weak-based, though, and not all weak phenomina are directly related to radioactivity. That's just the only thing a layman has heard of where it's relevant.
The strong force only holds atoms together through a sort of trickle-down force, too, but that one feels like splitting hairs.
Well, the article currently lists them as: gravity, electromagnetism, the strong force and the weak force.
If you're not familiar, you wouldn't be able to guess that the last two are nuclear forces and in the context of a new force, that list is rather confusing.
From Wikipedia: this is only a 1-sigma result compared to theory using lattice calculations. It would have been 5.1-sigma if the calculation method had not been improved.
Many calculations in the standard model are mathematically intractable with current methods, so improving approximate solutions is not trivial and not surprising that we've found improvements.
Tangentially related but I can't seem to find the answers and I have a couple questions that perhaps someone can answer:
Do stars actually generate muons directly? From what I understand the muons on Earth are a result of cosmic rays colliding wtih particles in the atmosphere.
If they do, how far do they travel before decaying? Even if they travel at relativistic speeds, they have a mean lifetime of 2.2 ns, so the math seems to say they don't travel very far at all on average.
Either way, are there any other sources of muons in the universe? I'm curious what the muon density distribution in the universe would look like.
Why would you assume it's an emergent property and thus should be dismissed as not being a force of nature? I'm making fewer assumptions than you are by wanting to list it alongside the other forces until we can determine if it is emergent or not, and the implications of such emergence. It's kind of a big deal that we can sit here and ponder the forces of nature with some degree of control over our little sack of atoms.
It's safe to say that this list is going to change over time and represents a current snapshot of humanity's limited understanding. Under the current snapshot of human understanding, leaving it off of the list seems to me to indicate an ironic bias on the behalf of researchers who must use the very force in question to do anything. By necessity, it is the overarching phenomenon surrounding all other forces since the only place we can definitively know these forces even exist is within our own mind. To say anything more is to make assumptions.
While I agree that a certain level of assumptions are necessary if we're going to get anywhere, I'm also acutely aware that they're still assumptions and that assumptions are not scientific. If we're going to be scientific about this, we need to make as few assumptions as possible.