“Had the bump been real, it would have without a doubt been the most important discovery in particle physics in the past half century,” said Lawrence Krauss, a cosmologist at Arizona State University. “We have seen the Higgs, we expect to see something else,” said Lisa Randall, a Harvard particle theorist who was not part of the CERN experiments. They could have been produced in pairs by the radioactive decay of a new particle. Advertisement Continue reading the main storyThe Higgs, one of the heaviest elementary particles known, weighs about 125 billion electron volts, in the units of mass and energy favored by particle physicists — about as much as an entire iodine atom. Theoretical papers started flowing immediately, suggesting, among other things, that the new particle might be a cousin of the Higgs — good for supersymmetry — or a graviton, the conjectured quantum carrier of gravity.

Source: New York Times August 05, 2016 16:01 UTC