A new Boson?

[Jackie]

Seems as good a time and place as any to put this here...

I would have ended the song with, "Nothing really matters, Laurence Krauss can see, nothing really matters, to me".

[Alex K]

Good idea, different vid

[Alex K]

So, today were the presentations giving updates of the searches for the potential new boson. They didn't have much in the way of new data because like last year, the LHC had a winter shutdown and will only restart around Easter. Still, one of the experiments only now incorporated some data that were previously excluded due to technical difficulties. Analyses of old data were improved for better sensitivity. There are rumours of another unpublished analysis which shows an even bigger signal, but all in all, the significance in the official analyses went up a bit, but only further measurements starting in a few weeks will be able to clarify whether we are witnessing the biggest revolution in fundamental physics for decades, or just a statistical freak.

[ignoramus]

Explain a little better for us laypersons please.
Are you saying there might be other unique unknown particles where none were predicted via the maths previously?

[Alex K]

Explain a little better for us laypersons please.
Are you saying there might be other unique unknown particles where none were predicted via the maths previously?

Exactly. The Higgs boson was expected because the theory needed it or something like it, but after that the maths was complete, simply speaking, and it's not clear whether there are new particles to discover. Dark matter is the clearest hint that there should be new particles. This one can't be the dark matter because it obviously decays - but it could be related to dark matter and enable us to discover it.

If the signal is real, It would require an entirely new theory which would open up unexpected possibilities for research. There are many ideas what it could be of course.

[Jehanne]

[Jackie]

[Alex K]

Jehanne,

the Opera neutrino time of flight measurement was rather different in character for several reasons - first of all it was just one number, a timing measurement. The LHC detectors register complex events, in this case with two high energy photons coming out of a collision, and there is little doubt that the excess as seen has indeed occurred - the one opera timing number was off because of a faulty connector. Events as we see them here cannot just be faked by a simple fault in the machine like a loose wire. One more difference: having a new particle that would make such a signature in the LHC is theoretically quite plausible (i.e. it is not hard to write down a mathematically consistent model that produces such effects) whereas I myself have published a paper back in the day showing that it is basically theoretically impossible to have superluminal neutrinos the way Opera seemed to observe them for reasons I can go into if you're interested.

The Opera superluminal neutrino measurement was wrong due to a loose optical connector, this signal here is probably nothing because it will turn out to be an accidental statistical upward fluctuation rather than a systematic error in the experiments.

[Jehanne]

[Alex K]