Data from this year’s LHC run hints at a new particle

New York Times : On Tuesday, the ATLAS and CMS teams at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) presented summaries of the data collected during the 2015 run of proton–proton collisions. Both teams saw a roughly 1.2-sigma bump in their data at the 760-GeV energy level. If only one of the teams had seen the bump, it would likely not have been mentioned in the year-end report. The fact that both teams saw it with different detectors makes it more likely to be significant. It is still too soon, however, to claim this early evidence of a possible new particle as a discovery. A similar announcement was made during the end-of-year summary in 2011. Six months later the signal was strong enough to confirm the existence of the Higgs boson. At the energy level currently detected, a variety of particles could exist. The most likely is a heavier version of the Higgs particle. More unusual would be a graviton, the proposed carrier of the gravitational force in quantum gravity theories.