Hints of new particle found at CERN leads to deluge of papers
DOI: 10.1063/PT.5.029471
Nature : On 15 December the two main experimental teams using the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN announced tantalizing hints of a possible new boson particle. Since then, more than 95 research papers, the vast majority from theorists, have appeared on the preprint server arXiv. According to Paul Ginsparg, who runs arXiv, the flood of papers exceeds the numbers that resulted from two similar previous events: the now debunked announcements that neutrinos could travel faster than light and that gravitational waves had been discovered in 2014. Part of the rush is due to how arXiv works: Papers published first, which appear at the top of the most recent articles list, get more citations than those published last. On the same day as the announcements were made, CERN theorist Gian Francesco Giudice and his collaborators posted a 32-page paper analyzing the LHC data; it already has 68 citations.
More about the authors
Paul Guinnessy, pguinnes@aip.org
