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Physicists Detect Whiff of New Particle At the Large Hadron Collider (sciencemag.org)
sciencehabit quotes a report from Science Magazine: For decades, particle physicists have yearned for physics beyond their tried-and-true standard model. Now, they are finding signs of something unexpected at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world's biggest atom smasher at CERN, the European particle physics laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland. The hints come not from the LHC's two large detectors, which have yielded no new particles since they bagged the last missing piece of the standard model, the Higgs boson, in 2012, but from a smaller detector, called LHCb, that precisely measures the decays of familiar particles. The latest signal involves deviations in the decays of particles called B mesons -- weak evidence on its own. But together with other hints, it could point to new particles lying on the high-energy horizon. "This has never happened before, to observe a set of coherent deviations that could be explained in a very economical way with one single new physics contribution," says Joaquim Matias, a theorist at the Autonomous University of Barcelona in Spain. B mesons are made of fundamental particles called quarks. Familiar protons and neutrons are made of two flavors of quarks, up and down, bound in trios. Heavier quark flavors -- charm, strange, top, and bottom -- can be created, along with their antimatter counterparts, in high-energy particle collisions; they pair with antiquarks to form mesons. In their latest result, reported today in a talk at CERN, LHCb physicists find that when one type of B meson decays into a K meson, its byproducts are skewed: The decay produces a muon (a cousin of the electron) and an antimuon less often than it makes an electron and a positron. In the standard model, those rates should be equal, says Guy Wilkinson, a physicist at the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom and spokesperson for the 770-member LHCb team. The new data suggest the bottom quark might morph directly into a strange quark -- a change the standard model forbids -- by spitting out a new particle called a Z9 boson. That hypothetical cousin of the Z boson would be the first particle beyond the standard model and would add a new force to theory. The extra decay process would lower production of muons, explaining the anomaly.
"Getting desperate"?
Projecting, much?
I have news for you: this is not Silicon Valley stupid.
Lack of "innovation" (i.e. new physics) is in itself a already good result. The LHC doesn't need any new shiny discoveries to justify itself. The very action of having looked for the first time in a certain place (or energy range) and having solid confirmation that there's nothing new to see would already be an outstanding scientifical result.
And everyone at CERN knows this, as does any scientist worth their spit.
Lack of "innovation" (i.e. new physics) is in itself a already good result.
Not really. Lack of new physics means that we have no explanations for the myriad of things which need new fundamental physics to explain sch as what is Dark Matter? and why is the Higgs boson so much lighter than the scale of quantum gravity? By the end of this run in 2018 we will have covered about half the phase space that the LHC can reach and the high luminosity LHC upgrade will provide the other half...over the next ~15-20 years because increasing luminosity is not as good as increasing energy.
This is not good news because it may mean that new physics is beyond the reach of the LHC and whether the world can afford to build a new, even bigger machine is far from certain. However we have zero control of the result - either the universe works in a way where there is new physics in reach of the LHC or it does not. So not seeing anything is far from a failure...but that does not make it a good result. Indeed I have always referred to it as the LHC nightmare scenario: we find the Higgs and absolutely nothing else which leaves a lot of unanswered questions and no certainty that we will be able to build a machine to find the answers.
Come on, CERN... come up with one good thing.
Obviously you don't consider discovering the Higgs particle a "good thing."
That makes whatever you consider a "good thing" stupidly unrealistic. I daresay CERN would be unconcerned about your criticism. The cheek.
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.