Theoretical physicists are churning out papers at a remarkable rate as they rush to analyze tantalizing hints of a new particle in data from the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).
Experimenters revealed their observations in a December 15 announcement at CERN, the European laboratory of particle physics that hosts the LHC near Geneva. Since then, 95 research manuscripts have been posted to the preprint server arXiv discussing the hypothetical particle, even though the statistical significance of the findings is low.
The surge of interest was anticipated; Tiziano Camporesi, a spokesperson for the LHC’s CMS experiment, told Nature just after the webcast announcement that he expected to see hundreds of preprints in the next two weeks. “I am extremely curious to see what our theorist friends will cook up,” he said.
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