Quote:
Originally Posted by sentinel
Fascinating news out of Fermilab, once again proving how vital that place still is for particle physics research even though it's been overshadowed by CERN for the past 10 years:
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-env...=pocket-newtab
Scientists just outside Chicago have found that the mass of a sub-atomic particle is not what it should be.
"The measurement is the first conclusive experimental result that is at odds with one of the most important and successful theories of modern physics.
The team has found that the particle, known as a W boson, is more massive than the theories predicted.
The result has been described as "shocking" by Prof David Toback, who is the project co-spokesperson...
...The scientists at the Fermilab Collider Detector (CDF) in Illinois have found only a tiny difference in the mass of the W Boson compared with what the theory says it should be - just 0.1%. But if confirmed by other experiments, the implications are enormous. The so-called Standard Model of particle physics has predicted the behaviour and properties of sub-atomic particles with no discrepancies whatsoever for fifty years. Until now." |
Finally got to reading the paper this morning. I have questions for the CDF folks (if you apply the same methodology to the earlier dataset, do you get the same result? Did something go wrong with the correlations between oservables that's not captured in the presumably Gaussian statistical treatment?), but all the CDF folks I know aren't really active in the collaboration anymore (unsurprisingly).