CERN Scientists Say There Is Something Bigger
IF IT is anything, it is what Gian Giudice has been waiting for his
entire scientific life. “We are not talking about a confirmation of
an established theory, but about opening a door into an unknown
and unexplored world,” says Giudice, a theoretical particle
physicist based at CERN near Geneva, Switzerland.
That’s if it turns out to be anything. At the moment, all we have
are hints emerging from the debris of collisions within CERN’s
showpiece particle smasher, the Large Hadron Collider. But if
those hints firm up in the course of the coming weeks and
months, it could be the big one. Forget the Higgs, forget even
gravitational waves: 2016 could go down as the year when a new
picture of nature’s fundamental workings was unveiled.
The hopes spring from two “bumps” that have appeared
independently, in the same place, in the latest data from the
LHC’s two big detectors, ATLAS and CMS. They point to the
existence of a particle that dwarfs even the Higgs boson, the
giver-of-mass particle discovered at CERN in July 2012.
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