BBC Knowledge Asia Edition 3

Update

THE LATEST INTELLIGENCE

BELOW: Prof Peter Higgs

predicted the Higgs boson

• the ‘God Particle’ – back
  in the 1960s, but it wasn’t
  discovered until 2012 at
  the Large Hadron Collider

PHOTOS: ALAMY X2, CERN

HAS A NEW PARTICLE BEEN FOUND AT CERN?

Four years after the discovery of the Higgs

boson, a new particle may have been

uncovered at CERN. Graham Southorn spoke

to Jon Butterworth, a member of CERN’s

ATLAS detector team

How did experiments reveal these hints?

The Large Hadron Collider [LHC] collides protons

[hydrogen nuclei] head-on and we discovered the

Higgs boson in those collisions. This new thing has

shown up in the data taken since then. We’ve cranked

up the energy, which means you can create higher

mass particles more

often because E=mc2.

The way the experiment

works is that you count

the number of pairs of

photons [particles of

light]. Most of them

come from random

collisions and there’s a

smooth distribution of

masses. But if there’s a

new particle in there,

there’ll be a

concentration of these pairs of photons around the

mass of the new particle.

What have you seen this time?

It seems like there’s another concentration of pairs of

photons clustered around [an energy of] 750GeV,

about 750 times the mass of the proton or roughly six

times the mass of the Higgs boson. It’s much heavier,

but in another sense the evidence is rather similar to

that for the Higgs. The evidence is about at the level

that it was for the Higgs about six months before we

announced it.

When will we know for sure this time?

If all goes to plan, I would expect an announcement

sometime in the summer conferences. It will either

have grown to the point where there’s a discovery, or

it will have receded a bit and we’ll be less excited. It’s

like looking at an object in the mist. As you get closer,

it either gets clearer or it fades away and turns out to

have just been a swirl in the mist.

What are the implications for physics?

It’s really exciting because this is not something that’s

expected in the Standard Model – in fact it’s excluded

“IT COULD BE THE FIRST HINT OF A BETTER,

BIGGER THEORY THAT THE STANDARD

MODEL WOULD BE EMBEDDED IN”

IN THEIR OWN WORDS