For nearly eight months, physicists have been waiting for confirmation of a potential new particle that could change our entire view of physics. Now it seems the hinted particle was nothing more than a statistical blip. In December 2015, the ATLAS and CMS collaborations at CERN announced that they had each found a bump in their data at an energy of 750 gigaelectronvolts (GeV): an excess in the number of photon pairs produced inside the Large Hadron Collider, compared with predictions from the standard model of particle physics. A week after the announcement, theorists had written over 100 possible explanations; today, there are over 500. Nearly all of these papers posit the existence of a particle
This summer in Chicago, from August 3rd until the 10th, theorists and experimental physicists from around the world will be participating in the International Conference of High Energy Physics (ICHEP). One of the highlights of this conference comes from CERN Laboratories, where particle physicists are showcasing the wealth of new data that the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) has produced so far this year. Thanks to all the new data provided by the LHC, the chance that a new elementary particle was discovered - a possibility that had begun to appear likely eight months ago - has now faded. The indications of this particle first appeared back in December of 2015, when teams of physicists using two of CERN’s particle detectors (ATLAS and CMS) noted that the collisions performed by the LHC were producing more pairs of photons than expected, and with a combined energy of 750 gigaelectronvolts.
The Higgs boson is peeking out of the new data collected during the second run of the Large Hadron Collider, scientists reported today at the International Conference on High Energy Physics in Chicago. The Higgs boson is a short-lived particle that transforms into a cascade of more stable particles immediately after it is produced. Because scientists cannot measure the Higgs directly, they look instead at the more stable particles it leaves behind. In 2012, during the LHC’s first run, scientists discovered the Higgs boson based on its decay into three different types of particles: photons, W bosons and Z bosons. In the data from the second run, which began in 2015, scientists have reconfirmed
