Hints of New LHC Particle Get Slightly Stronger
One fresh analysis keeps alive physicists' hope for a breakthrough, but another is disappointing
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/hints-of-new-lhc-particle-get-slightly-stronger/
"Hints of a mysterious new particle at the world's largest particle accelerator just got a little stronger. The excess of photons produced by particle collisions at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) has kept physicists abuzz since it was discovered three months ago: it is now slightly more statistically significant but still falls well short of the certainty needed to claim a discovery.
In December, physicists announced that they had seen an excess of pairs of ?-ray photons with a combined energy of around 750 gigaelectronvolts. The data came from ATLAS and CMS, the two largest detectors at the 27-kilometre LHC, which is at CERN, the European particle physics laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland.
That excess of photons seen by the CMS experiment has now become slightly more significant, owing to a fresh analysis reported on March 17 at a conference in La Thuile, Italy. But to the disappointment of many, the significance seen by ATLAS actually went down a bit, as a result of a more conservative interpretation of the data.
The data used in the latest CMS analysis is 23% larger as it includes collisions from early in the LHC’s 2015 run, when the detector’s magnet was switched off due to a problem in its cooling system. The magnetic field affects detector electronics, so data taken without the field needed careful and separate calibration. “The good news is, we now we have almost as much data as ATLAS,” says James Olsen, CMS physics coordinator and a physicist at Princeton University in New Jersey.
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Well, it's an update, anyway.
= new reply since forum marked as read
