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posted by martyb on Thursday November 01 2018, @10:03AM   Printer-friendly
from the What-Standard-Model dept.

New Ghost Particle may Have Manifested at Large Hadron Collider:

'Something terribly new' goes bump in data yet to be confirmed by Atlas detector.

Scientists at the Cern nuclear physics lab near Geneva are investigating whether a bizarre and unexpected new particle popped into existence during experiments at the Large Hadron Collider.

Researchers on the machine's multipurpose Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) detector have spotted curious bumps in their data that may be the calling card of an unknown particle that has more than twice the mass of a carbon atom.

The prospect of such a mysterious particle has baffled physicists as much as it has excited them. At the moment, none of their favoured theories of reality include the particle, though many theorists are now hard at work on models that do.

"I'd say theorists are excited and experimentalists are very sceptical," said Alexandre Nikitenko, a theorist on the CMS team who worked on the data. "As a physicist I must be very critical, but as the author of this analysis I must have some optimism too."

[...] In two separate analyses, the CMS team found data that pointed to a build-up of muons, or heavy electrons, in their detector. If real, the data indicates a new particle with a mass of 28GeV or 1[sic] billion electron volts, slightly less than a quarter of the mass of a Higgs boson. Whatever it is, it is not the particle Nikitenko and his colleagues were looking for.


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  • (Score: 2) by requerdanos on Thursday November 01 2018, @11:41PM (2 children)

    by requerdanos (5997) Subscriber Badge on Thursday November 01 2018, @11:41PM (#756669) Journal

    shitton of energy "should" convert and squirt out 50:50 matter and antimatter but observations of the actual ratio are disturbing.

    In the universes where 1:1 matter:antimatter is spit out, they meet and each annihilates the other leaving no matter, and leading to no galaxies, no stars, no planets, no scientists.

    So, obviously we are in a universe where the ratio isn't 1:1. What's disturbing about that? It was a given to start with.

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  • (Score: 2) by sjames on Friday November 02 2018, @12:39AM (1 child)

    by sjames (2882) on Friday November 02 2018, @12:39AM (#756682) Journal

    It's disturbing because the standard model firmly predicts 1:1 (and so no galaxies, no stars, no planets, no scientists). The field as a whole was hoping something might come up to explain the obvious defect but so far nothing presents itself.

    • (Score: 2) by requerdanos on Friday November 02 2018, @12:47AM

      by requerdanos (5997) Subscriber Badge on Friday November 02 2018, @12:47AM (#756686) Journal

      It's disturbing because the standard model firmly predicts 1:1

      You are quite correct and I partially repent of my smart-alec-ery.