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hubie [soylentnews.org] writes:

Two of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC [home.cern]) detectors, CMS [home.cern] and ATLAS [home.cern], have seen excess photon pairs that hint at the existence of a previously unknown boson [nature.com] with a mass of about 1500 GeV, 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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