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Scientists say hoped-for physics particle was just a blip

Agence France-Presse

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Scientists say hoped-for physics particle was just a blip

LAURENT GILLIERON

Scientists tweet their reactions to the news even before it is formally announced. 'No new particle announced at #ICHEP2016 today but that's how science works,' says Fermilab, the top US particle physics laboratory.

CHICAGO, USA – Hopes for a new particle discovery that might have up-ended the standard model of physics were dashed on Friday, August 5, as scientists admitted that a “bump” in the data was actually just a “blip.”

A great deal of excitement was generated by the December 2015 announcement that a fluctuation in the data had been found independently by two groups of scientists working on the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), a massive underground atom-smasher run by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN).

This bump, at an energy of 750 gigaelectronvolts (GeV), would have been six times heavier than the famous Higgs Boson particle, which gives items mass and was discovered in 2012.

But following much speculation and many leaks to social media, scientists announced at the International Conference on High Energy Physics in Chicago that indeed, there was no actual bump in either of two experiments, one dubbed Atlas and the other CMS.

“The intriguing hint of a possible resonance at 750 GeV decaying into photon pairs, which caused considerable interest from the 2015 data, has not reappeared in the much larger 2016 data set and thus appears to be a statistical fluctuation,” said a statement from CERN.

Scientists at the meeting – which is held every two years – tweeted their reactions to the news even before it was formally announced.

“No new particle announced at #ICHEP2016 today but that’s how science works,” said Fermilab, the top US particle physics laboratory.

“Basically 2 LHC experiments were both seeing the production of two photons more often than expected,” tweeted Brian Colquhoun, a particle physicist from the University of Glasgow. – Rappler.com

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