Data from a Large Hadron Collider (LHC) experiment strengthens the possibility of discovering a new particle.
In December 2015, experts were able to detect an excess gamma-ray photon pairs as a result of particle collisions at LHC. The said photons had a combined energy equivalent to about 750 gigaelectronvolts. Data about the mysterious particle from LHC's ATLAS and CMS had physicists talking and excited.
Larger, Not Richer
New analysis presented by the CMS at a conference in Italy on Thursday made the new particle more statistically significant. However, data presented by ATLAS on the same day did not exhibit new information to the dismay of many. What more, the significance presented by ATLAS plummeted as the data was considered more conservative than the previous one.
The CMS Review
The data set used in the most recent CMS review is said to be 22 percent bigger than the one used in the December experiment. This is because the new one entailed collisions from the early part of LHC's 2015 run.
Experts working at the CMS group repeated the regulation of the entire data set, which is something that experts perform at the end of each testing to see how radiation impacts measurements.
With such interventions, the statistical significance of the CMS bump shoots up from 1.2 to 1.6 sigma.
"The fact that their excess has gone up is a hopeful sign," says Marco Delmastro from the CNRS Theoretical Physics Laboratory in France. He, however, warns about taking necessary caution as statistics, he says is a "harsh mistress."
Delmastro was one of ATLAS results presenters.
More To Come
More information is expected to come in the next few weeks as more discussions in La Thuile, Italy are yet to happen.
If the excess will be proven to be a sign of a new particle, then it would most likely be a boson, which is a particle, connected with basic forces.
ATLAS physicist Marumi Kado from the University of Paris says being able to confirm the existence of a new signal would be very interesting as it would pave the way for more knowledge and more questions.
Then again, nothing is confirmed yet and as per previous experiments, the more data are collated, the more statistical bumps go away. For this, Kado says, caution is necessary. "Our job is to doubt — to always check for possible problems," he says.
