{"id":84604,"date":"2018-11-09T05:22:30","date_gmt":"2018-11-09T13:22:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2018\/11\/this-mystery-particle-would-need-physics-so-weird-nobody-has-even-thought-of-it"},"modified":"2018-11-09T05:22:30","modified_gmt":"2018-11-09T13:22:30","slug":"this-mystery-particle-would-need-physics-so-weird-nobody-has-even-thought-of-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2018\/11\/this-mystery-particle-would-need-physics-so-weird-nobody-has-even-thought-of-it","title":{"rendered":"This mystery particle would need physics so weird nobody has even thought of it"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/a><\/p>\n

Now scientists at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at Cern think they may have seen another particle<\/a>, detected as a peak at a certain energy in the data, although the finding is yet to be confirmed. Again there\u2019s a lot of excitement among particle physicists, but this time it is mixed with a sense of anxiety. Unlike the Higgs particle, which confirmed our understanding of physical reality, this new particle seems to threaten it.<\/p>\n

The new result \u2013 consisting of a mysterious bump in the data at 28 GeV (a unit of energy) \u2013 has been published<\/a> as a preprint on ArXiv. It is not yet in a peer-reviewed journal \u2013 but that\u2019s not a big issue. The LHC collaborations have very tight internal review procedures, and we can be confident that the authors have done the sums correctly when they report a \u201c4.2 standard deviation significance\u201d. That means that the probability of getting a peak this big by chance \u2013 created by random noise in the data rather than a real particle \u2013 is only 0.0013%. That\u2019s tiny \u2013 13 in a million. So it seems like it must a real event rather than random noise \u2013 but nobody\u2019s opening the champagne yet.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Now scientists at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at Cern think they may have seen another particle, detected as a peak at a certain energy in the data, although the finding is yet to be confirmed. Again there\u2019s a lot of excitement among particle physicists, but this time it is mixed with a sense of [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":396,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[48],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-84604","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-particle-physics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/84604","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/396"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=84604"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/84604\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=84604"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=84604"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=84604"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}