Physicists in Europe Find Tantalizing Hints of a Mysterious New Particle (original) (raw)
Science|Physicists in Europe Find Tantalizing Hints of a Mysterious New Particle
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Researchers at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN are smashing together protons to search for new particles and forces.Credit...Fabrice Coffrini/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
- Dec. 15, 2015
Does the Higgs boson have a cousin?
Two teams of physicists working independently at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, reported on Tuesday that they had seen traces of what could be a new fundamental particle of nature.
One possibility, out of a gaggle of wild and not-so-wild ideas springing to life as the day went on, is that the particle — assuming it is real — is a heavier version of the Higgs boson, a particle that explains why other particles have mass. Another is that it is a graviton, the supposed quantum carrier of gravity, whose discovery could imply the existence of extra dimensions of space-time.
At the end of a long chain of “ifs” could be a revolution, the first clues to a theory of nature that goes beyond the so-called Standard Model, which has ruled physics for the last quarter-century.
It is, however, far too soon to shout “whale ahoy,” physicists both inside and outside CERN said, noting that the history of particle physics is rife with statistical flukes and anomalies that disappeared when more data was compiled.
A coincidence is the most probable explanation for the surprising bumps in data from the collider, physicists from the experiments cautioned, saying that a lot more data was needed and would in fact soon be available.
“I don’t think there is anyone around who thinks this is conclusive,” said Kyle Cranmer, a physicist from New York University who works on one of the CERN teams, known as Atlas. “But it would be huge if true,” he said, noting that many theorists had put their other work aside to study the new result.
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