Apr 3 2019
Ever since the discovery of Higgs Boson in 2012, no innovative elementary particles have been identified at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider to date—a fact that has disappointed a large number of researchers.
The inability to identify particles that had earlier been proposed by theory is just one case of a “hole” that has lately featured in the notion of naturalness in theoretical physics. In other words, the concept specifies that physical parameters should rely more or less equally on all the terms utilized to compute them, with regards to proportion.
Now, an interesting article has been published in the EPJ Plus journal by Sauro Succi, a theoretical physicist at the Fondazione Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia in Rome, Italy, who contends that a number of standard natural phenomena do not work under “naturalness” at all. Instead, they can merely be elucidated using parameters that have broadly divided numerical values.
In his latest article, Succi applies the idea of “un-naturalness” to two intricate aspects of theoretical physics—robustly correlated systems of the elementary particles called fermions, and the turbulence of fluid flows. Among these, only the first topic correlates to his principal research field—simulations of flowing matter above the microscopic scale and below the macroscale through a computer. Succi explained how theories like these have similarities that are also shared with the similarities of “un-naturalness” in high-energy physics.
While this analysis is extremely theoretical and even intangible at present, Succi claimed that it can possibly be used for designing novel materials for biomedical and engineering applications. In the long term, simulations predicated on these principles may enable the computer simulation of whole biological organelles, for example, the Golgi apparatus. Succi expressed his thanks to a CERN coworker who triggered his interest in facets of complexity and naturalness in theoretical physics that are considerably removed from his principal area of research.