Researchers on CERN’s multipurpose Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) detector have spotted downright weird bumps in their most recent data. The team at CMS think they might have discovered a mysterious particle with twice the mass of a carbon atom.
The find comes from two separate pieces of analysis from the CMS team. In both, the CMS team were able to find data that pointed to a build-up of muons (a type of heavy electron) in the detector.
The data would indicate a new particle with a mass of 28GeV or 1 billion electron volts which would have slightly less than a quarter of the mass of a Higgs boson.
Speaking to The Guardian, Alexandre Nikitenko, a theorist on the CMS team explained that “theorists are excited and experimentalists are very sceptical” of the new find which doesn’t fit into any of the existing theories of reality ( of course many theorists are now going to be working on models that do ).
The team at Atlas, the LHC’s other multipurpose detector, are now double checking their own data to see if they can find any evidence of the mystery particle.
Whatever the team have found it was not the particle they were looking for and analysis will be so time-consuming it could take another year confirm with any certainly if the particle exists.
More info will be available this Thursday when the team have scheduled a talk to describe how they spotted the bumps in CMS data.
