Three weeks ago, upon sifting through the aftermath of their proton-smashing experiments, physicists working at the Large Hadron Collider reported an unusual bump in their signal: the signature of two photons simultaneously hitting a detector. Physicists identify particles by reading these signatures, which result from the decay of larger, unstable particles that form during high-energy collisions. It’s how they discovered the Higgs boson back in 2012. But this time, they had no idea where the photons came from.
If—and at this point, it’s a big, fat if—this bump is real and not a statistical anomaly, it is a game-changer for physicists’ understanding of the universe. The signature can’t be explained by the Standard Model, the current rulebook for how all particles behave and interact. That could mean entirely new physics—though what kind, researchers don’t yet know.
“We were like, ‘Whoa, what is that?’” says Adam Martin, a physicist at the University of Notre Dame who recently submitted a paper theorizing about the bump to arXiv, the online, pre-peer review science repository. “What if it’s a new particle? What if it’s two?”
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