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posted by cmn32480 on Wednesday December 16 2015, @03:28PM   Printer-friendly
from the don't-call-boson-fat dept.

Two of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) detectors, CMS and ATLAS, have seen excess photon pairs that hint at the existence of a previously unknown boson with a mass of about 1500 GeV [gigaelectronvolt], which is about 12 times larger than the mass of the Higgs boson. The excess photons turned up while searching through data looking for gravitons. By themselves the data are not very significant and would not have garnered much interest, but this becomes more interesting since both experiments saw these statistical bumps in the same place. The next round of data taking in March will be able to determine whether this particle really exists.

In addition to what they might have found, also of interest is what they haven't found:

Meanwhile, searches for particles predicted by supersymmetry, physicists' favourite extension of the standard model, continue to come up empty-handed. To theoretical physicist Michael Peskin of the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in Menlo Park, California, the most relevant part of the talks concerned the failure to find a supersymmetric particle called the gluino in the range of possible masses up to 1,600 GeV (much farther than the 1,300-GeV limit of Run 1). This pushes supersymmetry closer to the point where many physicists might give up on it, Peskin says.


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  • (Score: 2) by http on Thursday December 17 2015, @09:40PM

    by http (1920) on Thursday December 17 2015, @09:40PM (#277919)

    The assumption that "that stuff must exist to make our equations work" exists, and searching for it, has been a successful one, and a driving force, in physics and chemistry for centuries. I highly recommend reading "The Neutrino" by Asimov. While it might seem dated (written in the 1960s, QCD is kinda skipped over) it explains much more concisely than I could why conservation laws are used by humans doing physics and chemistry, and how studying apparent violations of those laws keeps on leading us to new discoveries.

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