Physicists have found that the W boson — a fundamental particle that carries the weak nuclear force — is significantly heavier than theory predicts
The Tevatron particle collider at Fermilab in Batavia, Illinois, was once the world’s most powerful accelerator.From its resting place outside Chicago, Illinois, a long-defunct experiment is threatening to throw the field of elementary particles off balance. Physicists have toiled for ten years to squeeze a crucial new measurement out of the experiment’s old data, and the results are now in.
Some physicists strike a note of caution. Generating a W boson mass measurement from experimental data is famously complex. Although the work is impressive, “I would be cautious to interpret the significant difference to the standard model as a sign of new physics,” says Matthias Schott, a physicist at the Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz in Germany, who works on the ATLAS experiment at CERN, Europe’s particle-physics lab near Geneva, Switzerland.
Colliders produce W bosons by smashing particles together at high energies. Experiments typically detect the bosons when they decay into a neutrino plus either a type of electron or its heavier cousin, the muon. The neutrino escapes the detector without a trace, whereas the electron or muon leaves conspicuous tracks.
A computer image of a particle collision in Fermilab’s CDF detector shows a W boson decaying into a positron and an unseen neutrino .In the latest work, Kotwal and his collaborators aimed to take the most precise measurement ever of the W’s mass. The data had all been collected by 2011, when— a 6-kilometre-long circular machine that collided protons with antiprotons and was once the world’s most powerful accelerator — shut down.
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