Molecular experiments hope to reveal new physics

An image showing Robert Berger, Ronald Garcia Ruiz and colleagues

Source: © KU Leuven/Rob Stevens

Detecting extremely short-lived radium fluoride can explore standard model’s limits

Even though radioactive radium fluoride molecules exist for just a fraction of a second, scientists have made them and found that they could extend our fundamental understanding of physics. An international team of scientists used a particle accelerator at Cern in Geneva, Switzerland, to produce the molecules, and studied them spectroscopically before the radium atoms decayed.