Physics blogs are alive with chatter about a possible sign of the Higgs boson – or perhaps an entirely unexpected particle – in data from the Large Hadron Collider near Geneva, Switzerland. But the claim has not gone through the experiment's vetting process and could easily turn out to be wrong, physicists say.
The LHC, which smashes beams of protons together, was built largely in the hope of netting the first observational evidence of the Higgs, which is thought to endow other particles with mass. The Higgs is the last undiscovered particle in the standard model of particle physics, which for three decades has reigned supreme in explaining how particles and forces interact.
The latest rumours of its possible sighting come from an abstract that was posted by an anonymous commenter on mathematician Peter Woit's blog on Thursday.
The abstract appears to be part of a longer paper written by four physicists involved with the LHC's ATLAS detector, though the full paper has not been posted publicly yet.
The authors of the abstract say ATLAS data shows more photon pairs than expected with an energy of 115 GeV.
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