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Story from the Guardian [theguardian.com]

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.

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 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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