Fermilab’s Claim Of New Subatomic Particle Discredited By Rival Team

Fermilab believed they hit the motherlode this past April after findings from the Tevatron particle accelerator suggested a new subatomic particle was out there. A second, independent group has analysed that same data and claim there is no new particle.

The research team DZero has a detector of their own in a different section of the Tevatron and have been poring over their own data from the same experiments. Originally, Fermilab pointed to a “bump” in energy levels that was inconsistent with expected behaviour for particles involved in the experiment. DZero says that bump didn’t exist in their findings.

One of the earliest theories attempting to explain this discrepancy is how the experiment was modeled. If the analytical equations were off from the start, then it would provide faulty results. DZero considers this a possibility. Fermilab thinks there’s not much of a difference between the two sets of results, but they have yet to read DZero’s paper.

The ultimate decider of this debate will likely be the Large Hadron Collider. Many in the science community expect the experiment to be replicated on the larger proton accelerator, which could provide definitive results anywhere between the next 3-18 months. [New Scientist via Slashdot]

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(1 Comment)
  • [–]

    Anadish Kumar Pal

    Tuesday, June 14, 2011 at 11:00 AM

    Sure, Higgs boson never explained the whole. But attempted to explain the oldest concepts of modern physics in quantum framework, which was given a raw demonstration by Galileo in 1589 by dropping objects from the Leaning Tower of Pisa. We start learning Physics with his laws of force and friction but never learn more than that ever during our whole tenure as students. A quantum explanation of mass and gravity thus will give a body to the 100 year old painting of quantum mechanics.

    However, it’s not Higgs boson, but unnamed particles of two origins, which create gravity between ‘masses’. The discovery already took place in 2010 and has now been reported as a USPTO application which will be officially published by the US Patent Office. Some general landmarks are on my site http://www.anadish.com/. I have refrained from giving details, as the details are already under publication.

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