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Physicists pour over data hinting at mystery particle

Posted by Bridget in Physics & Maths

Courtesy of the US Dept of Energy and World Science staff

A new subatomic particle may be found, if intriguing new data from the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Illinois, is confirmed, physicists say.

The particle is not part of the ‘standard model’ of physics that forms the generally accepted picture of the basic units of matter and their interactions. As such, the finding could upend the standard model, some physicists said.

As it stands, researchers reported, the data indicate that there is only a one in 1 375 chance that the findings are a statistical fluke. The scientists said they plan to repeat the experiments with at least twice as much data in order to get a better sense of whether they have discovered something.

It’s not the much-anticipated ‘Higgs Boson,’ a hypothetical particle that would help complete the Standard Model, researchers said, at least not in its traditional form. The Higgs would explain why other particles have mass or weight.

The findings come from an international collaboration of scientists working at the particle collider in Batavia, Ill. Members of the Collider Detector at Fermilab, or CDF, collaboration project were smashing together protons, subatomic particles that sit at the cores of atoms, and antiprotons, exotic particles that are like protons but with opposite electrical charge.

An unusually high number of collisions produces W boson

An unusually high number of collisions resulted in a specific set of by-products, the investigators found. These by-products consisted of a particle known as a W boson, along with two hadronic jets, beams of particles. Calculations show these collision products suggest that after the collision there briefly appeared a new particle estimated to weigh about 140GeV/c², about halfway between the weight of an atom of silver and that of an atom of gold.

The result has been submitted to the research journal Physical Review Letters. Researchers at the Large Hadron Collider, the world’s largest particle smasher, outside of Geneva, Switzerland, are expected to also check their data for signals of the particle.

Source: World Science,http://www.world-science.net