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Hints of an unexpected new particle could be confirmed within days
- tremon 10y agoAny physicists around to elaborate on the prevailing theories for this? The article isn't exactly heavy on the details... Is this suggested particle something like the muon-equivalent of the Higgs? (edit: I've found http://resonaances.blogspot.com/2015/12/a-new-boson-at-750-gev.html http://resonaances.blogspot.com/2015/12/a-new-boson-at-750-g..., which at least has more details and more speculations)
- arenaninja 10y agoThanks for the link. The Standard Model is pretty much believed to be incomplete. It's why many people were hoping to not find the Higgs and allow room for things like super symmetry (SuSy). It is still standing though (which the article mentions), so I'll keep waiting for further experiments on what is going on here
- T-A 10y agoSorry to nitpick, but the Higgs and SUSY are not mutually exclusive. SUSY actually requires multiple Higgs fields.
- arenaninja 10y agoNot at all nitpicky, indeed my details are fuzzy because to my detriment, I only showed up for the first day of Particle Physics since I had already completed my upper-level physics credits. I missed out on one of the most interesting courses from an excellent professor
- ifdefdebug 10y agoI am not a physicist, but you can already read tons of crack pottery about the bump all over the internet, while most serious scientists are still waiting for the confirmation of the bump. But if it goes away unconfirmed, and odds are still high for that, it will be silently buried.
- jsprogrammer 10y agoWouldn't retractions need to be issued and explanations given?
- Etheryte 10y agoRetractions of what? There have been no (serious) publications regarding this yet. Presenting experiment data is just that, stating what was measured, not necessarily saying why.
- jsprogrammer 10y ago"it", according to the post I responded to. Admittedly, it was never defined, but seemed to be used in place of "claims by the few serious scientists who are not waiting for confirmation".
- stephengillie 10y agoThis PBS video helped me understand the discovery, and put it into context: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KFOgIijPWGY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KFOgIijPWGY There's speculation this could be as mundane as a penta-quark proton, or a number of exciting particles.
- beezle 10y agoYou beat me to posting it. It does sound like Jester is leaning more towards new strong interactions. Everytime they call the SM dead, it lives.
- peter303 10y agoDi-photon decay suggests it is a boson or force vector with no charge and integer spin. Perhaps it is a super resonance of the Higgs or some unkown force.
- peter303 10y agoDi-photon decay suggests it is a boson or force vector with no charge and integer spin. Perhaps it is a super resonance of the Higgs or some unkown force.
- ifdefdebug 10y ago"It would be bigger than the detection of the Higgs boson, which was just confirmation of what was already known." This is so wrong. Finding the Higgs where it was expected was very important because otherwise "what was already known" would have been false.
- gpderetta 10y agoOf course it was important, but discovering hints of physics beyond the standard model at energies we have a chance to probe is a Big Deal.
- ThePhysicist 10y agoI think the difference that the author wants to stress here is that this new particle would be something that no one has predicted. The discovery of the Higgs, on the other hand, was an experiment that confirmed a theory which had been formulated several decades ago. And while this is also an amazing achievement, finding a particle that can't be accounted for with our current theories is much more exciting (to me at least), as it means that our current understanding of particle physics is fundamentally or at least partially wrong. This, I think, is exactly the kind of discovery that people expected from the LHC: Something new and exciting that invalidates our current theories and gives us a possibility to devise / test new ones against real experimental data. After all, the real shortage in particle physics is not the number of theories (we can invent a quasi infinite number of them), but the data against which we can test them.
- ifdefdebug 10y agoAs I see it, before the Higgs was seen, this search was also a search for "new physics", because if Higgs was wrong, a lot of new physics would have been needed to explain the things Higgs was trying to explain. It's just that everybody was expecting a confirmation because all of the rest of the SM turned out to be right so far, so nobody really expected new physics to come from there. Now since the last chance of "new physics" due to the lack of a signal where a signal should have been is gone, everybody turns their hope to finding a signal where no signal was expected. This is of course totally legitimated, but it doesn't take away any of the importance of the former. I would love to see something new too, but if the SM explains everything we are able to measure today just fine, then be it. Then the SM is all we need, until we are able to measure more. It's just like the people in the 19th century: they had to go with Newton because they couldn't measure anything beyond Newton. But on the other hand, back then Newton was all they needed, because Newton could explain everything they saw.
- pdonis 10y agoUnfortunately, this sort of linkbait headline has become typical for Scientific American (which is one of the reasons I haven't subscribed for years). As has already been pointed out in these comments, the Standard Model is already believed to be incomplete by particle physicists, and discovering a new particle in this general energy regime is exactly what everyone has been hoping for for a couple of decades now. Yes, such a new particle is not included in the Standard Model--because there hasn't been any experimental evidence for one. If this discovery pans out, particle physicists will finally be able to start model building again the way it was done when the SM itself was built: based on good experimental data.
- busyant 10y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline... "This story is a great demonstration of my maxim that any headline which ends in a question mark can be answered by the word "no." The reason why journalists use that style of headline is that they know the story is probably bullshit, and don’t actually have the sources and facts to back it up, but still want to run it."
- guelo 10y agoYou didn't really say anything the article didn't say.
- pdonis 10y agoI also didn't say some things that the article did say (and which I think are unjustified). For example: "This could mean nothing less than the fall of the Standard Model of particle physics (SM)" No, it means that the SM is an approximation to a deeper theory, which everybody already believes anyway and has for several decades. Models don't "fall" just because they turn out to be approximations. "The SM describes what the building blocks of the universe are and how they work, and from there, at least in principle, explains every other phenomenon in nature." No, it doesn't. The SM doesn't include gravity. It also has twenty-six free parameters that have to be determined from experiments; it doesn't explain why those parameters take the values they do. So it's obviously incomplete, and everybody has known that for several decades. (Yes, the article does go on to talk about the SM being incomplete. But that just means it contradicts itself.) In short: the article talks like this discovery is somehow a huge change in how everybody views the SM. In fact it's business as usual: we built experiments to try to discover new physics to help us extend a model we knew was incomplete, and now those experiments are bearing fruit. This is normal science. It is not some huge rift in particle physics.
- joshmarinacci 10y agoWhen the headline is a question, the answer is always no. Even if this does mean new physics it doesn't mean the standard model will 'fall'. It will simply be expanded.
- anotheryou 10y ago* https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines
- anotheryou 10y agowhops, sorry for the wikiwand link. Just wondered why I was getting downvoted.
- erikpukinskis 10y ago> When the headline is a question, the answer is always no. People keep saying this, but it's so obviously false to me I don't understand how a thinking person could believe it.
- tremon 10y agoIt's still a good heuristic. When presented with a question as headline, I immediately answer it with "no". If I still want to read the article when the question has been answered, that might mean I'm genuinely interested in the topic.
- GFK_of_xmaspast 10y agoIt's just to show how hip they are in this forum.
- akeruu 10y agoNo. As per Betteridge's law of headlines [1]. Joking aside, while the article has some content, the headline is definitely tending way to much towards click-bating. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...
- gaur 10y ago> Who will win the US presidential election? > No. I have no idea why people insist on quoting an obviously nonsensical formulation of this aphorism. It clearly can only be applied to headlines phrased with yes-no questions, so saying it applies to "any headline that ends in a question mark" is false.
- partisan 10y agoI am sure that we can institute an HN corollary that states that for any headline in which there is a question mark in the title, someone on HN will quote Betteridge's Law of Headlines. Forgive me if this has been done already.
- Trombone12 10y agoWhat a shitty article. First of all, the excesses presented in December are more noteworthy because they demonstrated how much information flows between the supposedly "independent" general experiments. In December the global CMS excess (the one that matters) was 1.2 sigma, but heyoo a little bird told us ATLAS sees a 2 sigma global excess at the same place so into the slides it goes! So much for independence... Since then there was an update in march where ATLAS still sees a global significance of 2 sigma and CMS is down below 1. Local significances are up though CMS has pushed their 2.6 to 2.8, and ATLAS has gotten their 3.6 sigma into 3.9 (Both have also added a new model for interpreting this, I'm just giving the largest sigma values reported). The reason improvement is so modest is because there hasn't been any new data on account of the LHC being set in the "off" position. Anyway, the reason the OP article is such crap is that it doesn't mention any details about the rumour it is so clearly based on. Perusing more technical rumourmongers I find a mention of a 4.7 sigma excess in an ATLAS analysis that wasn't approved in time for the big conference in March. So if the article is based on that rumour, it is about three months old by now. But we can't tell, since the author wusses out on even saying what detector will "CRACK PARTICLE PHYSICS WIDE OPEN"... -_-
- acqq 10y agoAnd if it's ATLAS it's probably a spin-0 particle, which means another kind of Higgs which was also "kind-of" expected (or was imaginable). And finding it doesn't negate everything found up to now. The chance to find new particles is exactly why the experiments are done -- we have to observe something new to make a real progress in that area. However, CMS saw something like a spin-2 particle, but with less certainty, so their claim can be just a wishful thinking if ATLAS comes close to the 5 sigma? Disclaimer: not a particle physicist, just based on another articles I read. If somebody knows more she (or he) is more than welcome to correct.
- pizlonator 10y ago5 sigma or it didn't happen! (And thanks for the great summary.)
- archgoon 10y agoFor those of you have heard about this back in December, there is no new data at the moment. The only update is that CERN is firing up again; hopefully we'll hear an update in the next several months or so.
- gus_massa 10y agoI agree with the other comments that this is a bad article, but I want to highlight yet another bad quote. > But this particle is not the Higgs boson: it is six times more massive. Nobody had predicted anything like this. This is false, there are a lot of alternative expansions of the Standard Model. Each one include a few new particles that are difficult to find because it's necessary to use a bigger (or much bigger) particle accelerator. For example, the first paragraph of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Higgs_boson#Alternative_models https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Higgs_boson#Alternative_models explains a theory that predict a family of 5 Higgs bosons. The lighter one is(would be) the one we had seen. The other 4 are unobserved yet (don't exist because the theory is wrong).