New Particle Spotted At The LHC!?
New Particle Spotted At The LHC?!
Since the discovery of the Higgs Boson in 2012, the Large Hadron Collider has not managed to find any new particles.
Recently, there was some strange data was seen at the LHC and it suggests that we may have discovered a new particle. At the LHC, protons are smashed together and evidence for new particles is seen by looking for a weird number of known particles such as electrons and photons. This is because heavier particles, such as the Higgs Boson, are often unstable and so fall apart into lighter particles that we detect. By analysing the lighter particles, physicists can work out which particles were the result of decay.
If the lighter particles are muons, they usually they come from different parent particles and so when calculating a parent mass, there is a spread over a wide range of energies.
There was a spike in the data at 28GeV suggesting that a pair of muons came from one large parent particle however. It turns out that if this spike is real, then the muon pairs must have come from a 28GeV particle that has never been seen.
The probability of getting a peak this big by chance rather than by a particle is 13 in a million and so it is likely to be a real event. This probability may be misleading however due to the "look elsewhere effect". If you look specifically at 28 GeV, the probability might be 13 in a million but the probability of getting random noise when you look at all random values will be a lot higher. This probability is still small however but it does increase the chance that the peak was caused by random noise.
The even stranger thing about the particle is that its properties do not seem to fit with any of the theories to supersede the standard model. If this particle is a real particle and not just a statistical fluctuation, then physics will be bound to change dramatically in the coming years.
It is more likely however that this is just a fluctuation due to some glitch, over-enthusiastic analysis or bad luck.
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