Get the latest tech news
What could explain the gallium anomaly?
Physicists have ruled out a mundane explanation for the strange findings of an old Soviet experiment, leaving open the possibility that the results point to a new fundamental particle.
“We cannot find some huge uncertainty in our experimental procedures,” said Vladislav Barinov, a particle physicist at the Institute for Nuclear Research of the Russian Academy of Sciences who works on the experiment in the Caucasus. A researcher with the Gallex experiment, which ran in the 1990s at Gran Sasso National Laboratory in Italy, is shown holding a device called a proportional counter that was used for detecting germanium atoms. If they do exist, light sterile neutrinos will “wreak havoc” on our current understanding of cosmology, Abazajian said, including ideas of how atoms formed in the minutes following the Big Bang and the theory of the cosmic microwave background, the remnant heat from the initial expansion of the universe.
Or read this on Hacker News