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the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) machine at CERN
Luis Davilla/Getty Images
Late last year, when most people were getting ready for the holidays, physicists at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) machine at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, made a startling announcement: Their two massive detectors had identified a small bump in the data with an energy level of about 750 GeV.
This level is about six times larger than the energy associated with the Higgs particle. (To go from energy to mass divide the energy by the square of the speed of light.) For comparison, the mass of a proton, the particle that makes the nuclei of all atoms in nature, is about 1 GeV. The Higgs is heavy — and this new bump, if associated with a new particle, would be really heavy.
The high energy physics community answered with verve. In a few months, hundreds of papers have been published with hypothetical explanations for the bump.
Last month, physicists at CERN released a bit more information, slightly strengthening their claim for the reality of this new data point. Right now, the bump has a 1 in 20 chance of being just a spurious statistical fluctuation, something that happens from time to time, even if rare.
When do scientists declare that something is "real," that is, that something belongs to the collection of other particles we have found so far that make up all the material diversity we see? It's a tricky question. There is an agreed standard, that the signal for a new particle must be certain to a level of 1/3,500,000. That's very far from 1/20, and that's why physicists are not announcing a new discovery just yet. However, if all goes well with the LHC operations, by late fall we should have enough data to decide whether the bump is real. Read More
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