Wednesday, December 16, 2015

Hints of a new particle

Dennis Overbye reports in the NY Times:
One possibility, out of a gaggle of wild and not-so-wild ideas springing to life as the day went on, is that the particle — assuming it is real — is a heavier version of the Higgs boson, a particle that explains why other particles have mass. Another is that it is a graviton, the supposed quantum carrier of gravity, whose discovery could imply the existence of extra dimensions of space-time.
No, it will not be a graviton, and a graviton would not imply extra dimensions.

They found the Higgs, but no SUSY particles.

Funny that there is no mention of supersymmetry. The LHC was built to find the Higgs, and confirm the standard model, and to find some supersymmetry (SUSY) particles to disprove it.
When all the statistical effects are taken into consideration, Dr. Cranmer said, the bump in the Atlas data had about a 1-in-93 chance of being a fluke — far stronger than the 1-in-3.5-million odds of mere chance, known as five-sigma, considered the gold standard for a discovery.
So don't get excited yet.

1 comment:

  1. They actually don't really know if they found a 'Higgs' particle, only a large particle they wish to call the Higgs, and they needed a monte carlo data massage to find even that.

    Breaking 'symmetry' (which was needed since gauge math does not account for particles having mass at all) is a mathematical contrivance or fiction, not a physical force or property of matter. I also notice that since the discovery of the 'Higgs', there have been zero breakthroughs of any kind leading to our understanding of mass as was endlessly promised in the over heated press releases. Lots of hype, but no actual discoveries.

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