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Inside the ATLAS detector

The large story ended up a sort of not-story. In 2012, scientists working at the LHC were surprised to meet the same statistical anomaly in ii separate experiments: a fluctuation in the data implied a new particle whose energy level, some 750 GeV, would have meant it was six times heavier than the Higgs boson. ATLAS and the CMS experiment both reported the same bibelot, leaving physicists alternately puzzled and excited. "Every explanation of the 750 GeV excess needs a new particle," commented Kansas University physicist Kyoungchul Kong, and a new particle in that range would crave a departure from the Standard Model.

Just, later on a year of inspection, CERN is ready to put the kibosh on that idea. As they appear at the International Briefing on High Energy Physics, "The intriguing hint of a possible resonance at 750 GeV decaying into photon pairs, which caused considerable interest from the 2015 information, has non reappeared in the much larger 2016 data fix and thus appears to be a statistical fluctuation."

"No new particle announced at #ICHEP2016 today but that'due south how science works," tweeted Fermilab.

When news of the blip first bankrupt, mountains of papers were submitted to the various peer-reviewed particle physics journals, including Physical Review Messages, the leader in the field. Some idea the readings could hateful the teams had found WIMPs; others idea the discovery could shed light on the balance of matter and antimatter. Kong coauthored one of the four papers that PRL ultimately published, and his proposed explanation for the anomaly was a jump. Most models straightforwardly assumed a new particle at 750 GeV, Kong explains, but his hypothesis was a "sequential pour decay" of a heavier particle into photons that could "fake the resonance signal" at 750 GeV.

CMS LHC CERN 13 TeV

The LHC's CMS detector running at 13 TeV, setting a record in 2015.

Pauline Gagnon, who has retired from CERN, commented that while "major leaps" are rare, blips in the information are "non uncommon in particle physics given the statistical nature of all phenomena we observe." In evidently linguistic communication, the LHC produces such a stupefying amount of data that it should be no surprise to find some outliers.

"Had the crash-land been real, it would have without a doubt been the most important discovery in particle physics in the by half century," said cosmologist Lawrence Krauss. "Which is why the odds were that information technology probably wasn't."

Dr. Tiziano Camporesi, spokesperson for the CMS detector squad, said, "It'due south disappointing because so much hype has been made most it." But, because the experimenters had known from the beginning that the blip was probably just a blip, "we accept always been very cool almost it."

In the cease, it's not like nosotros're going to retire the atom smashers for not finding a particle that breaks out of the Standard Model. The LHC should exist running for decades yet. "Theorists propose ideas," said Kong, "and experimentalists perform experiments to test the ideas, and then publish their results – and we try to understand."

Now read: How does the Large Hadron Collider piece of work? and What is the Higgs Boson, and why is information technology so of import?