While conducting collisions at the Tevatron, physicists from Fermilab discovered what could very well be a new elementary particle. Interestingly, the existence of this particle was not predicted by the Standard Model of Particle Physics. The discovery was made as experts at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, in Batavia, Illinois, were conducting proton-antiproton collisions. The detectors on the machine analyze debris produced by these collisions, searching for new particles.
This time, scientists were able to discover a series of interesting events, clustered around an energy level of 145 gigaelectronvolts (GeV), indicating the existence of a new particle of the same mass.
Just after the experts figured out the potential particle is not a part of the Standard Model, they also figured out that it's not the Higgs boson, the force carrier believed to allow energy to acquire mass.
The datasets experts work with now were collected by the CDF experiment on the Tevatron, over a period of 8 years. The collisions researchers focused on were supposed to produce the carrier of the weak nuclear force – the W boson – and two jets of elementary particles called quarks.
Experts with the CDF team analyzed a massive amount of data to validate the findings. The more they studied the results, the clearer the connection got. The strength of the signal the team is seeing is at 4.8 sigma, which is extremely close to the gold standard of 5 sigma.
Beyond 5 sigma, the readings are considered evidence of the existence of this new particle. At this time, there is still a 1 in 1 million chance that the particle is just a statistical error of some sort.
Speaking this week at a conference in Blois, France, CDF physicist Giovanni Punzi said that experts with the Fermilab DZero experiment will provide an independent peer review of the investigation.
“We're still going through all the data, and we've got two other teams repeating the analysis in a different way, so we're not going to publish a five-sigma result until all of our i's and t's are dotted and crossed,” explains CDF spokesperson Rob Roser, quoted by
Daily Galaxy.
Some scientists believe that the newly-found particle may be Z-prime, boson force carrier similar to, but at the same time different than, the weak nuclear force. The team admits however that the Z-prime should have been found at the CERN Large Electron–Positron Collider (LEP).
Other groups argue that the readings are proof that supersymmetry is real. This theory holds that each particle has a partner, with slightly different properties. As such, the data could indicate the energy level of a squark or selectron.
A team of experts even believes that the readings may indicate the presence of a particle called technipion. It appears in the technicolor theory, which argues that an extra force exists in the Universe, that is similar to the strong nuclear force.
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