What next after mooted new particle vanishes?

• Autores: Leah Crane
• Localización: New scientist, ISSN 0262-4079, Nº. 3086, 2016, pág. 7
• Idioma: inglés
• Texto completo no disponible (Saber más ...)
• Resumen

  • Last week, physicists from CERN aimounced disappointing news: a potential new particle, set to shake up modern physics, doesn't exist. The dream had lasted almost eight months, since the ATLAS and CMS collaborations found an unexpected bump in their data last year. The detectors at the Large Hadron Collider had measured more proton pairs with a shared energy of 750 gigaelectronvolts (GeV), than is predicted by the standard model of particle physics. If the detection had turned out to be genuine, this could have pointed to a new particle. Theorists produced more than 500 papers on how such a find would affect our understanding of particles and forces. But data gathered this year and presented at the international Conference on High Energy Physics in Chicago on 5 August confirmed that the excess was a statistical fluke, the equivalent of getting a surprise run of heads when flipping an ultimately fair coin