Question Details
Will the new particle or force discovered by the Fermilab's Tevatron accelerator be confirmed?
Settled on 06/10/2011 05:30 Settled by gotmick
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Background
Fermilab's Tevatron has shown compelling hints of a never-before-seen particle, researchers say. The find must be more fully confirmed, but researchers at the Tevatron are racing to work through existing data.
If proved, it will be a completely new, unanticipated particle -- researchers say it cannot be the much sought-after Higgs boson -- it could also signal a new fundamental force of nature, and the most radical change in physics for decades.
Confirming the result more fully is simply a matter of working through the numbers the team already have to hand. Further, the coming experimental run at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) should provide even more data to confirm or refute the new particle - whatever it is.
"There's a 0.1% chance that this is a statistical fluke," Dan Hooper, a theoretical physicist at Fermilab who was not involved in the research said. "Other than that possibility that lingers, this is the most exciting new phyiscs we've learned about in my lifetime."
If it is in fact true, Dr Hooper believes that the mystery particle represents an undiscovered "fundamental force": "We'd essentially be saying there's a new force of nature being communicated by the particle. We know that there's four forces: electromagnetism, gravity, and the strong and weak nuclear forces. This would be the fifth; every freshman physics class would have to change their textbooks."
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-13000253
http://www.fnal.gov/pub/science/accelerator/
http://www.symmetrymagazine.org/breaking/2011/04/07/fermilabs-data-peak-that-causes-excitement/
http://arxiv.org/abs/1104.0699
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