US atom smasher may have found new force of nature: Report

[optimsprm]

US physicists are to announce Wednesday that data from a major atom smasher lab may have revealed a new elementary particle, or potentially a new force of nature.A spokeswoman from the US Department of Energy's Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, which operates the powerful particle accelerator Tevatron, said the results would be released at

Comments

[goseaward]

Hmm. Think of it like...throwing a bunch of ping-ping balls at a statue in the middle of the room. Most of the time the ping-pong balls bounce off the edges of the statue, like you expect, but every once in a while they go right through and bounce off the far wall of the room. You'd be able to deduce that there was a hole somewhere in the middle of the statue that you hadn't expected, but until you get closer and look around, you can't do more than say, like, it's somewhere near the legs.

In this case, particle physicists bounce particles off each other; some of the particles interact in specific ways to produce new particles, which can interact to create other new particles, etc. And you can trace back the kinds of particles you see at the end to figure out what particles were present in the middle stages. In this case, they see some particles that tell them there was an intermediate particle with a given mass that isn't the mass of any particle we know about, so it has to be something new. But since we didn't see it directly, and since none of the theories we currently have predicts a particle like this one, we don't know what it is.

That's assuming this turns out to be a real particle, of course! The detection is at the lowest limit considered publishable, and will have to be confirmed by other experiments (which means the LHC).