Fox: Big discovery: Tiny electron's mass more precisely measured

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Big discovery: Tiny electron's mass more precisely measured
By Tia Ghose

Published February 20, 2014
LiveScience
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    The most precise measurement yet of the electronâs shape casts doubt on ideas such as supersymmetry that predict a zoo of undetected particles in the universe. (SHUTTERSTOCK)
Scientists have made the most precise measurement yet of the electron's atomic mass.

"It is a major technical improvement," said Edmund Myers, a physicist at Florida State University, who wrote an accompanying News & Views article Wednesday in the journal Nature, where the new measurement is detailed. "They have improved the precision by a factor of 13." The new value is just the tiniest bit smaller than the previous best value, though not by a significant amount.

The new measurement could one day be used in experiments to test the Standard Model, the reigning physics theory that describes the tiny particles that make up the universe.

But before the new value can be used to test the basic physics theory, other fundamental constants
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need to be measured at higher precision, Myers said. [The 9 Biggest Unsolved Mysteries in Physics
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]


http://www.foxnews.com/science/2014/02/20/tiny-electron-mass-more-precisely-measured/
 
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