A particle accelerator in the US 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. Read more
Physicists at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory are planning to announce Wednesday that they have found a suspicious bump in their data that could be evidence of a new elementary particle or even, some say, a new force of nature. One possible explanation for this mysterious bump, scientists say, is that it is evidence of a new and unexpected version of the long-sought Higgs boson. This is a hypothetical elementary particle that, according to the reigning theory known as the Standard Model, is responsible for endowing other elementary particles with mass. Another explanation might be that it is evidence of a new force of nature - in addition to gravity, electromagnetism, and the strong and weak nuclear forces we already know and are baffled by - that would manifest itself only at very short distances like those that rule inside the atomic nucleus. Read more
The CDF collaboration will present new results at 21:00 to 22:30 (GMT) on 04/06/2011.
Viviana Cavaliere, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, will give the special seminar, titled "Invariant Mass Distribution of Jet Pairs Produced in Association with a W boson in proton-antiproton Collisions at sqrt(s) = 1.96 TeV."
Streaming video of the talk will be available through Visual Media Services live video stream.
Title: Invariant Mass Distribution of Jet Pairs Produced in Association with a W boson in ppbar Collisions at sqrt(s) = 1.96 TeV Authors: CDF Collaboration, T. Aaltonen, et al
We report a study of the invariant mass distribution of jet pairs produced in association with a W boson using data collected with the CDF detector which correspond to an integrated luminosity of 4.3 fb^-1. The observed distribution has an excess in the 120-160 GeV/c^2 mass range which is not described by current theoretical predictions within the statistical and systematic uncertainties. In this letter we report studies of the properties of this excess.