Rocking Physics with: Philip (Flip) Tanedo & the potential discovery of a Dark Force.

   Could a small research team in Hungary have found a new fundamental force of nature? If they did, the implications for particle physics would be HUGE. After the recent disappointment of the 750 GeV diphoton bump, the broader physics community is taking a measured approach towards the new findings.  3rd Rock spoke with one of the physicists from the UC Irvine team who recently validated the anomaly to get a little more background on their tantalizing findings.

Phillip "Flip" Tanedo - Physicist

3RSF: Before we jump into your recent findings, one of the main goals of the 3rd Rock Science Foundation (3RSF) is to bring the excitement of science to children and cultivate an interest in STEM careers. With that in mind, when did you know you wanted to become a scientist?

Flip Tanedo: Like a lot of people my age, I grew up watching a fair amount of television. I think from an early age, I'd really attached myself to science-oriented programming on public broadcasting: segments on Reading Rainbow, 3-2-1 Contact, Square One TV.  I grew up with a healthy appreciation of the fun involved in science and mathematics. 
But I think it wasn't until junior high school that I really decided that I wanted to become a scientist---a physicist in particular. I'd picked up a book called "The Physics of Star Trek"---this was back in the hey day of physical book stores where you could wander around and find interesting books on the shelves. I read about black holes and warp drive---and would learn about all the little details that the writers of Star Trek had to tiptoe around to write semi-plausible science fiction. I devoured the book and simultaneously became a fan of Star Trek and physics. 

3RSF: Yes, cool to hear that Lawrence Krauss's book, "The Physics of Star Trek" helped stoke your interest in physics. Once you were down the path  of becoming a physicist, what led you to your particular area of research?

Flip Tanedo: My research area is theoretical particle physics. This is also known as high-energy physics, because my experimental colleagues use large particle colliders to probe nature on the smallest scales. In that sense, our biggest colliders like the Large Hadron Collider are actually microscopes. 
My particular specialty these days is finding ways to study dark matter---the mysterious stuff that holds our galaxy together---and learn about its properties as an exotic particle.

3RSF: Incredibly exciting times right now in particle physics. Still makes me lament not having the SSC in Texas, but at least we have the LHC at CERN.  And finally, who is your favorite scientist (past or present)?

Flip Tanedo: Growing up I think Richard Feynman was a figure that I looked up to as a hero. He was one of the truly great American physicists of all time. His legacy isn't just in his Nobel-prize winning work, but also the contributions that he made to developing an intuition to understand nature at its most exotic extremes. He's sort of a larger-than-life figure, and perhaps a lot of how we understand his character is a carefully projected persona in his autobiographical books---but that's a character that has inspired generations of scientists. 
There are also a few others who have left their indelible marks on me.  All of my mentors and advisers have played a direct role in shaping me as a scientist---and there's quite a long list of those: teachers, fellow students, colleagues, senior faculty, and even administrators who would nudge me in the right direction. 
One of my mentors since I was an undergrad who continues to guide me is Suchitra Sebastian, who is now a professor at the University of Cambridge. Her speciality is the growth of exotic materials---something very far from my own research---but she is someone who continues to be a source of inspiration in how to navigate academia: being kind to others, looking out for junior colleagues, being guided by doing good science, and understanding the ways in which our science is a service to the public that supports us.

3RSF: Very cool! The incredible community of scientists that the US has in our universities is not recognized nearly enough (3rd Rock is working on that). Now onto the potentially "dark" findings you and your colleagues submitted a few days ago to arXiv. Did you or any of your colleagues have fun with the Star Wars "dark side / dark matter" force carrier connection?

Flip Tanedo: Haha, sorry---no star wars jokes on our side. The dark matter connection is very speculative. If we interpret the Hungarian experiment as a sign for new physics (which is itself already making an assumption), then it really tells us that the new particle does two things:
1. It talks to quarks (because it talks to Beryllium)
2. It talks to electrons (because that's what it is decaying into)
Nothing here suggests that this interpretation requires an interaction with dark matter, it's just a speculation that a particle like this would fit nicely in the dark matter story. That would be a separate thing to test for.

​3RSF:  Ok, thanks...We had to ask! But on 3rd Rock's whiteboard,  we call it "The Darth Particle"  because we could no longer resist the power of the Dark Side.

3RSF: You mentioned the initial Hungarian discovery of the 17 MeV anomaly by Attila Krasznahorkay.  His team of nuclear physicists  reported their findings back in April of 2015. How did your team decide to dive into those rather obscure findings?

Flip Tanedo:  It was actually very funny. One of my collaborators, Susan Gardner, is a nuclear theorist from the University of Kentucky. She was spending her sabbatical at Irvine and we would meet to discuss areas where our research overlapped and where there might be neat things for us to do. One day shortly before Christmas, another colleague, Bartosz Fornal, joined one of the meetings and handed out copies of a manuscript that had just been published. The manuscript reported a 6.8 sigma anomaly that could be interpreted as a new particle---and our jaws all dropped. 
How could nobody be talking about this? (We would later learn that a few people in the particle physics community were actually aware of the results, but hadn't taken it too seriously.) Part of the reason was that the result was published as a nuclear experiment. Nuclear physics is actually something of a distant cousin to particle physics---so it's not so common for the two communities to keep an eye on each others' papers. Bartosz says that he was just looking through journals to look for interesting results... I suspect he may have accidentally clicked on the wrong link when he found the Hungarian paper!

3RSF: That is AWESOME! Shows again that the path of discovery follows no set course.  The scientific community at large still has a long way to go with cross-disciplinary collaboration and sharing of findings (3rd Rock is also working on that).  We love that you guys found the Hungarian's bread crumbs and followed them to these findings. Are you aware of any particle accelerators that are going to test your findings?

Flip Tanedo: There are actually all sorts of different experiments that will be able to test the new particle interpretation of the Hungarian result! This was one of the really exciting results of our study. We provided the theoretical scaffolding to really dig into the new particle proposal. If the Hungarian result is real, then we showed what the new particle would have to do to be consistent with known particle physics, and also where it should show up next.
One really exciting possibility is a search based on data from LHCb, one of the detectors at the Large Hadron Collider. Physicists at MIT showed how that experiment could use the decays of charm mesons to search for new, light particles. It's neat that the Hungarian result points directly to a type of new particle that is smack dab in the region where LHCb can look.

3RSF: Very exciting findings that can be easily validated! 3rd Rock's favorite kind of science! We are all pulling hard for 17 MeV to make a reappearance, and regardless of the outcome, love that the team from UC Irvine explored the Hungarian's findings with an open mind for discovery.  

3RSF: So with that, 3rd Rock Science wants to give a shout out to each of the members of the research team from UC Irvine that included:  Jonathan L. Feng, Bartosz Fornal, Iftah Galon, Susan Gardner, Jordan Smolinsky & Tim M. P. Tait.  With a HUGE THANK YOU to Flip Tanedo (now at UC Riverside) for providing the exceptional insights and backstory regarding their research and his journey to becoming a physicist. 

***Make sure you checkout Flip's blog post regarding these findings at:
 http://www.particlebites.com/