The electron is so round that it’s ruling out potential new particles

<i>The experiments are now so sensitive that if an electron were the size of Earth, they could detect a bump on the North Pole the height of a single sugar molecule.</i><p><i>This new bound is sensitive to energies above roughly 10^13 electron-volts — more than an order of magnitude beyond what the LHC can currently test.</i><p>Wow.

I do not understand this. May someone help me with an ELI16?<p>An electron is a cloud that is contained with a perfectly round sphere. Does cloud mean a thing that contains a particle that travels very fast in a perfect sphere?<p>What does cloud entail in this instance? If we have determined that an electronic cannot be made up of other particles then there should only be one particle in the cloud? Or is the particle a gas &#x2F; cloud?<p>I thought that the general consensus was that the precise location of an electron was impossible (?) to fully predict? If you can&#x27;t predict where an electron is with a high degree of certainty How can you measure it ?<p>This might be outdated, or just my brain pulling tricks on me again.

This leads me to the logical question about EDM of protons and neutrons. The electron and neutron are mentioned, but nothing for proton EDM. What&#x27;s up with that?<p>Also apparently the EDM for the neutron has yet to be detected, despite it being a composite particle. Our sensitivity is about five orders of magnitude away from the predicted value.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Electron_electric_dipole_moment" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Electron_electric_dipole_mom...</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Neutron_electric_dipole_moment" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Neutron_electric_dipole_mome...</a><p>Also of note, here&#x27;s a pEDM experiment with a 50m radius (the eEDM experiment is lab scale).<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;aip.scitation.org&#x2F;doi&#x2F;10.1063&#x2F;1.4967465" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;aip.scitation.org&#x2F;doi&#x2F;10.1063&#x2F;1.4967465</a>

Can someone explain what an electron is? I remember from my high school physics that electrons are &quot;point-like&quot; particles, which are &quot;elementary&quot; (not built out of any smaller particles). And electron clouds are like all possible or probable trajectories of how electrons move around an atom&#x27;s nucleus. Or something like that, it was many years ago. Then what is a &quot;cloud of negative charge&quot;?

<i>The Standard Model predicts a vanishingly tiny EDM for the electron — nearly a million times smaller than what current techniques can probe.</i><p>This is a big achievement, but a lot more work in this direction remains.

&gt; If an electron were the size of Earth, the experiment could detect a bump the size of a sugar molecule.<p>Makes sense, as the electrostatic force is about 10^36 times stronger than the gravitational force.

So the TLDR is that the electric dipole moment of electron seem to match the one predicted by the Standard Model at least as far as our current measurement capability goes and as we get more and more accurate measurements the wiggle room shrinks so the likelihood that the EDM predicted by the SM is correct increases which lowers the likelihood of post SM physics?

It&#x27;s interesting to consider the parallels between the electron&#x27;s roundness and the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation&#x27;s uniformity. Both seem to defy our expectations of asymmetry, with the electron&#x27;s shape ruling out new particles and the CMB&#x27;s uniformity challenging our understanding of the early universe. As we explore these seemingly unrelated phenomena, perhaps there lies a deep, underlying connection that could unite our understanding of the microcosm and the macrocosm, offering a fresh perspective on the laws governing our universe.

Can someone tell me what version of &quot;shape&quot; we&#x27;re talking about here? I thought electrons were point charges.

If an electron were the size of Earth... did its mass increase or did its density decrease?<p>Would it be a black hole with a planet-sized event horizon?<p>What would happen to a sugar molecule on the north pole of a planet-sized electron with infinitesimal density?

I find this result satisfying. Of course an electron is as a Platonic solid, that&#x27;s very sensible. God does not play dice -- God plays with marbles.

Explain like I’m five follow up question: is this electron able to exist in infinite places in space or only in predetermined slots?<p>I.e. does space consists of pixels?

preprint is here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;arxiv.org&#x2F;abs&#x2F;2212.11841" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;arxiv.org&#x2F;abs&#x2F;2212.11841</a>

&quot;Imagine an electron as a spherical cloud of negative charge&quot; sorry man, you lost me on the very first sentence

It’s tangential, but I don’t know how physicists understand the “why is there something rather than nothing?” question. At best, it’s quantification without a predicate. At worst, it’s metaphysical gobbledygook of the same variety that physicists constantly deride philosphers for.

It’s simple. Antimatter goes the other direction in time.<p>Just as you can go forwards and backwards in the X dimension. Matter can only go in one direction through time, antimatter the other.<p>So at the point of the Big Bang matter went on its direction through time saying buh-bye to antimatter that went in the opposite direction.<p>Note: I didn’t say forward and backwards because from their perspective we are the ones who went in the opposite direction.<p>This accounts for the lack of antimatter, the “missing mass” of the universe and why time travel (other than into the future for us) is impossible as the only way you could go in the opposite direction (the past) would be to convert yourself to antimatter which would be very very bad.<p>This also doesn’t mean there is an antimatter earth somewhere out there (in the other time direction so we’d never know anyway) because at the point of the Big Bang an entire series of events &#x2F; interactions would have occurred. There’s no interacting link between the two times (t+1 vs t-1)<p>Figure out the maths for yourself…