Elementary Particle’s Unexpected Heft Stuns Physicists

In particle physics, data long outlives the detectors that generate it. A decade ago the 4,100-metric-ton Collider Detector at Fermilab reached the end of its life and was shut down, stripped of its parts for use in other experiments. Now a fresh analysis of old CDF data has unearthed a stunning discrepancy in the mass of an elementary particle, the W boson, that could point the way to new, as yet undiscovered particles and interactions.

“Nobody was waiting for this discrepancy,” says Martijn Mulders, an experimental physicist at CERN near Geneva, who was not involved with the new research but co-wrote an accompanying commentary in Science. “It’s very unexpected. You almost feel betrayed because suddenly they’re sawing off one of the legs that really support the whole structure of particle physics.”

Since then, the results have gone through multiple further rounds of peer review—but that only guarantees the physicists have done their homework, not that they have found new physics. This work took a decade because of the numerous uncertainties in the data, Kotwal says. To reach its unprecedented level of precision—twice as precise as the previous best single experiment measurement of the W boson mass, which was made by the ATLAS collaboration——the CDF team quadrupled their dataset and also used new techniques.

In the meantime, theorists will pounce on this new result to produce myriad possible explanations. Although the LHC has ruled out many permutations of supersymmetry —a set of theories positing that elementary particles have “superparticle” partners—one culprit that could be shifting the W boson’s mass ever so slightly is a cohort of relatively light supersymmetric particles.

The W boson is not one particle

The foundation of the current theory is completely wrong. The W boson, like any other composite particles, is just combinations of relativistically rotating electrons and positrons. Think thru the meaning of the two fundamental charges and you shall see light.

Because they aren’t accounting for the other particles. It is going to be another 20 years before humans can detect the other particles created when the W boson splits. The wega, blunka, chum laa, dupsum, hunda, goile…

😯

As a member of the UA-1 collaboration that discovered it, I have a soft spot for the W (and Z)! ⚛️

Were the previous measurements before COVID? I put on a little weight as well.

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