The article https://www.sciencealert.com/physicists-may-have-discovered-new-force-of-nature-in-lhc-experiment speculates that possibly the effect of the fifth (so far unknown) force of nature has been detected during LHC experiments related to studying rates of beauty quarks decaying into electrons and their heavier cousins called muons. Since electrons and muons apparently differ only by their mass (as the article says), could someone explain me why the difference in rates is interpreted in the article as the vestige of the existence of the new (fifth) force of nature and not as another yet unknown property of the gravitational force, which exhibits itself during some elementary particles interactions?
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Particles' masses matter to much more than their coupling to gravity. For example, it can be shown that, beside decay channel counts, we expect an unstable particle's decay lifetime to scale as $1/m^5$, as long as the weak interaction is responsible. In particular, this explains the tau-muon lifetimes ratio. So it's wrong to think gravity would be at work in this recently discussed effect (assuming it's ultimately upheld at $5\sigma$). In fact, gravity between elementary particles is many orders of magnitude too weak to explain it.
J.G.
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