CERN allegedly has found a new particle with mass 750 GeV/c^2. The heaviest standard model fundamental particles had been top quark (173) and Higgs boson (125). What is this new particle? Does it really exist? Maybe it is merely some sort of composite "glueball" and nothing beyond the standard model. CERN does not yet consider itself to have the requisite 5sigma confidence level to announce it certainly exists, but presumably less than 1 more year of data would suffice. Various physicists expressed skepticism. http://www.livescience.com/53130-possible-new-particle-found.html -- Warren D. Smith http://RangeVoting.org <-- add your endorsement (by clicking "endorse" as 1st step)
As far as I understand (not much) the new particle was found by looking for instances where 2 photons come flying out of the collision-site with good enough simultaneity to act as though they were produced by the decay of some particle into 2 photons. And then you compute to try to reconstruct everything to back-deduce the mass M of that particle. And then you plot the number of such detections of particles of mass M, versus M. Most of them are spurious. However, above the smooth curve of counts of spurious detections of mass-M "particles," you see a "bump" at M=750 GeV/c^2. This, you attribute to the existence of some new particle which decays into 2 photons. Righto. So this new particle is NOT "dark matter" since that would not decay into photons. It's normal non-dark matter. And it is uncharged. If it were a fermion it would have to also decay into a third particle such as a neutrino leading to the bump being smeared out, which it isn't. So it presumably is a boson. So it might be a glueball IF one exists at that energy, which presumably standard model computations could tell us after enough computing. If no such exist, though, then it'd be some new boson that goes beyond the standard model, meaning there is a new kind of short-ranged physical force. -- Warren D. Smith http://RangeVoting.org <-- add your endorsement (by clicking "endorse" as 1st step)
Among the usual "wanted list" of particles, I think the only one that perhaps this could be (?), is something that accomplishes the long-sought goal of explaining why there is so much more matter than antimatter. (If this new particle really exists and really has enough of the right kinds of un-symmetry, then perhaps it'd work for that.) -- Warren D. Smith http://RangeVoting.org <-- add your endorsement (by clicking "endorse" as 1st step)
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Warren D Smith