Watch Hints of an unexpected latest particle are getting stronger Video, and physicists are stumped
Since the first hints of a latest subatomic particle cropped up in results from the huge Hadron Collider (LHC) last December, physicists approximately the world have been scrambling to make sense of it.
We’ve now got literally hundreds of papers seeking to give details how this new particle could possibly exist within the background of our current understanding of the laws of physics - and if it can’t, what that income for present understanding of physics.
Now four latest papers have been published outlining the majority likely explanations, and let’s presently say if any of these turn out to be right, particle physics as we know it will have to go through one of its the majority significant overhauls ever.
"If this thing is true, it’s huge. It’s very different than what the previous 30 years of particle physics looked like," theoretical physicist David Kaplan from Johns Hopkins University told Emily Conover at Science News.
One thing to point out straight off the bat - we still don’t really know if this thing is real, or a statistical fluke, so there’s a big, fat warning floating over all this speculation until someone can prove that the telltale 'bump' in the data isn’t a mistake.
But assuming it’s not, here’s what we recognize.
Last year, two experiment run at the LHC - called ATLAS and CMS - independently came up with a 'bump' in their data that didn’t seem to create much sense, until the two teams compared them. These bumps were exactly the same across the two experiments, and pointed to a never-before-seen particle that, if real, would break the normal model of particle physics.
As we report back in March, the two teams arrived at this data dump by smashing protons jointly inside the LHC, which ended up produce slightly more high-energy photons (light particles) than our top theories of physics can predict.
"I would love for it to persevere, but I’ve seen so many effects come and go that I have to say in my heart of hearts I’m not extremely optimistic," physicist John Ellis from King’s College London, and the former head of theory at CERN, told The Guardian. "It would be such a fantastic finding if it were true, precisely because it’s startling, and because it would be the tip of an iceberg of latest forms of matter."
We'll presently have to wait and see, but we're absolutely narrowing in on this thing... if it's genuine.
We’ve now got literally hundreds of papers seeking to give details how this new particle could possibly exist within the background of our current understanding of the laws of physics - and if it can’t, what that income for present understanding of physics.
Now four latest papers have been published outlining the majority likely explanations, and let’s presently say if any of these turn out to be right, particle physics as we know it will have to go through one of its the majority significant overhauls ever.
"If this thing is true, it’s huge. It’s very different than what the previous 30 years of particle physics looked like," theoretical physicist David Kaplan from Johns Hopkins University told Emily Conover at Science News.
One thing to point out straight off the bat - we still don’t really know if this thing is real, or a statistical fluke, so there’s a big, fat warning floating over all this speculation until someone can prove that the telltale 'bump' in the data isn’t a mistake.
But assuming it’s not, here’s what we recognize.
Last year, two experiment run at the LHC - called ATLAS and CMS - independently came up with a 'bump' in their data that didn’t seem to create much sense, until the two teams compared them. These bumps were exactly the same across the two experiments, and pointed to a never-before-seen particle that, if real, would break the normal model of particle physics.
As we report back in March, the two teams arrived at this data dump by smashing protons jointly inside the LHC, which ended up produce slightly more high-energy photons (light particles) than our top theories of physics can predict.
"I would love for it to persevere, but I’ve seen so many effects come and go that I have to say in my heart of hearts I’m not extremely optimistic," physicist John Ellis from King’s College London, and the former head of theory at CERN, told The Guardian. "It would be such a fantastic finding if it were true, precisely because it’s startling, and because it would be the tip of an iceberg of latest forms of matter."
We'll presently have to wait and see, but we're absolutely narrowing in on this thing... if it's genuine.
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