As seen back in December, there was a tantalizing hint of a boson more massive than the Higgs, which if true, would point to some new and very exciting physics. Unfortunately, the blip in the data does not appear to be holding up under the scrutiny of better statistics. When the potential particle was announced, 377 papers were thrown up on arxiv as would-be Einsteins set out to stake a claim in the new theoretical physics wilderness. The null result was presented at the biennial International Conference on High Energy Physics.
The null results also set up one of the more humorous situations at the meeting. Immediately following the talks in which experimenters said the purported particle didn't exist, five different theorists took turns explaining what the particle might be.
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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.
(Score: 2) by Snotnose on Saturday August 06 2016, @08:22PM
You've gone through a couple boxes of chalk writing equations on the blackboard, written a paper, flown to a conference, rehearsed your talk. Then some dipwad ahead of you says "our bad, there was nothing there".
Now what? Head off to the bar? Give the talk anyway?
It was a once in a lifetime experience. Which means I'll never do it again.
(Score: 2) by TheGratefulNet on Saturday August 06 2016, @09:02PM
'but when we added yet another dimension, we got it all to balance and it works, again'
too many notes; but never enough dimensions, it seems.
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
(Score: 2) by aristarchus on Sunday August 07 2016, @12:08AM
But just imagine the teasing! "Your Boson is so massive, it generates its own gravity!" Sure, you could reply, "That is kind of the point." But it would be too late. Almost makes it a relief not to find it.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Sunday August 07 2016, @10:32AM
That's the explanation! After the researchers discovered how heavy it was, the boson decided to make a diet and lost mass, therefore the researchers couldn't find it any more, as they were looking for the old mass.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 07 2016, @11:22AM
Physics talks can be excruciating anyway. Sitting through those follow on talks must have been torture.