Jump from a high enough height and it won’t take long to see who would win in a battle between gravity and the forces that bind solid ground.
The relative weakness of gravity, at least compared to the power of electromagnetism and nuclear forces, seems to limit its power to large-scale phenomena on planets and galaxies.
For this reason, along with the challenge of marrying general relativity with quantum physics, physicists tend to play the role of manual wave gravity in the formation of particles, combining it with a rather arbitrary correction factor.
Two physicists from the Institute of Gravity and Cosmology at the Friendship of Peoples University of Russia (RUDN University) are now rethinking the place of gravity among the basic elements of nature, looking for solutions to equations that give this small force a greater role in explaining in which fundamental particles could appear.
At first glance, this seems like a pointless search. For a typical elementary particle, such as an electron, its electromagnetic attraction is 10 ^ 40 times stronger than its gravitational power.
Including gravitational effects when describing the movements of an electron around the nucleus of an atom would be like considering the impact of a mosquito when discussing a car accident.
Researchers Ahmed Alharthy and Vladimir V. Kassandrov believe that the mosquito could be more important than we give it, at least at the surprisingly low level of the Planck scale.
“Gravity can play an important role in the micro-world, and this assumption is confirmed by some data,” says Kassandrov.
The solutions established for the fundamental equations of field theory in space-time curvature seem to give way to a small but non-zero influence of gravity when we magnify closely. As the distances decrease, the gravitational tug eventually becomes comparable to that of the attracted loads.
There are also models that describe solitary waves that form in quantum fields, in which the small effect of gravity could help strengthen the wave.
The duo returned to semi-classical models of electromagnetic field equations, changing the commonly used manual flutter correction and applying rules that allow them to adjust some quantities, while ensuring that others remain fixed.
By slotting into quantities that define the charge and mass of known elementary particles, the team looked for solutions that were added.
For the most part, there have been no clear situations in which gravity seems necessary, at least for known particles.
But there were scenarios as the distances were reduced to about 10 ^ -33 meters for objects loaded with a mass of 10 ^ -5 grams where solutions appeared.
Theorists are not sure if their answers describe something we could find in the Universe, although they do set limits for a spectrum that corresponds to hypothetical semiquantical particles called maximons.
Pushing mathematics further, as the electric charge disappears into nothingness on the smallest scale, and the masses increase to a stellar magnitude, it is clear that gravity becomes a key factor in the appearance of objects in the quantum landscape.
This might sound like a fantasy flight, but such neutral waves of matter are the very things that make up hypothetical objects known as boson stars.
For the time being, gravity will continue to be reduced to a pressing side note in particle physics, its low strength, a mathematical complexity that offers no appreciable benefit in solving it.
One day, we may have to offer the weakest of the four fundamental forces due on the smallest scales of the Universe.
“In the future, we would like to shed light on this problem, which is interesting for physicists, but extremely complex in terms of mathematics,” says Kassandrov.
This research was published in Universe.