Official ATLAS and CMS plots:<p><a href="https://atlas.web.cern.ch/Atlas/GROUPS/PHYSICS/CONFNOTES/ATLAS-CONF-2015-081/" rel="nofollow">https://atlas.web.cern.ch/Atlas/GROUPS/PHYSICS/CONFNOTES/ATL...</a><p><a href="http://cms-results.web.cern.ch/cms-results/public-results/preliminary-results/EXO-15-004/index.html" rel="nofollow">http://cms-results.web.cern.ch/cms-results/public-results/pr...</a><p>This video shows how one of the plots evolves over time as you discover a particle (in this case, the Higgs, discovered in 2012):<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zLZZOrpQFo4#t=3m" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zLZZOrpQFo4#t=3m</a><p>A nice blog post:<p><a href="http://resonaances.blogspot.co.uk/2015/12/a-new-boson-at-750-gev.html" rel="nofollow">http://resonaances.blogspot.co.uk/2015/12/a-new-boson-at-750...</a><p>While exciting, there are countless examples in history of such discoveries disappearing as more data is collected.
The most interesting paragraph of the article is:<p><pre><code> A coincidence is the most probable explanation for the
surprising bumps in data from the collider, physicists
from the experiments cautioned, saying that a lot more
data was needed and would in fact soon be available.
</code></pre>
So the data analysis is extremely complicated, in part because the number of tries depends on the correlation of datapoints. So if you look at 2 sigma signal in one hundred datapoints you expect to find 5 and even worse, if you try one hundred different measures then you expect 5 two-sigma events, if the measures are independent, which they are not in practice. So to calculate the number of tries is a highly non trivial business, which depends on exact knowledge what each desperate grad student did on his weekend.<p>So the nice thing about data from both CMS and ATLAS is, that we can fix this by asking, what is the probability that CMS sees something at the same energy and in the same channel as the most interesting ATLAS result. And as it turns out, it is a 2-sigma event. So there is just a one in twenty chance that this occurs by random chance. However one in twenty is not exactly a discovery, just the probability that the Niners win on Sunday.<p>Edit: Two things, first that analysis is of course very conservative and second even if it is a real effect, it may be just a presently badly understood background effect.
Dumb question from non-physicist - if the 'Standard Model' is a good theory, why don't we have a good idea of where to find particles [ ie. predict their mass and other properties ]?<p>Is the problem that its just hard to compute these values ?<p>Or does the theory not predict particle masses ?<p>Or do we need a fully unified theory of all fundamental forces, before we can predict particle properties from first principles ?
I'm confused about why they think it could be a graviton. Since gravity is an infinite-range force, wouldn't its carrier be massless like the photon?
First I read "heavy boson" and thought that sounded kinda metal, so it would be cool if they named it that, but then I misread "whale boy", which is even better, so I'm calling it now. Next heavy higgs boson will be called Whale Boy.
Lubos Motl has a really good post that cuts through a lot of journalistic hype and explains possibilities:<p><a href="http://motls.blogspot.com/2015/12/first-batch-of-9-pheno-papers-on-new.html" rel="nofollow">http://motls.blogspot.com/2015/12/first-batch-of-9-pheno-pap...</a><p>I'll just quote the summary:<p>> <i>You see that the diversity of the explanations is huge – it's a landscape of possibilities. Whether you like it or not, whenever certain things are uncertain, the possible answers are diverse. String theory's landscape reflects the same principle in another, more consistent and more constrained, formalism. And the purpose of this new particle is simply mysterious at this moment.</i><p>> <i>It seems very likely that the new particle is a j=0 scalar particle. And it seems guaranteed that it can't be the only new particle that has to be added relatively to the Standard Model. But who are the friends of SS and what is their relationship and purpose? Nobody knows. If this extra knowledge about the particle emerges, we may start to call it a heavy axion, a technicolor or composite scalar, a pseudo-Nambu-Goldstone boson, or – which I find more likely – a new Higgs boson analogous to the (three-year) old one.</i>
"Parked along the underground racetrack are a pair of mammoth six-story conglomerations of computers, crystals, wires and magnets: Atlas and C.M.S., each operated by 3,000 physicists who aim to catch and classify everything that comes out of those microscopic samples of primordial fire."<p>Is that a typo? Are there really 6,000 physicists actively doing work on the large hadron collider?
So to explain the world we see, we combine quantum theory, theory of relativity, dark matter, gravitation, electromagnetism, two types of nuclear force and a zoo of now 62 elementary particles?<p>I often wish for some kind of "Physical Philosophy". That tries to make sense of the world independent from those theories. For example: what if the theories just keep growing indefinitely? If we keep "finding" more and more complex theories that explain some aspects of what we see better then the old ones and keep "finding" new particles? What would that tell us about reality? What if we found a very simple formula that explains everything with just one type of particle and one dimension? Would it matter?