Large Hadron Collider Detects Boson Particle Heavier than Higgs

Experiments conducted by the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) over the past three years may have detected a new elementary boson particle that is denser than the famed Higgs boson. CMS and ATLAS physicists working at the LHC at the CERN laboratory in Switzerland, recorded a pair of photons during a collision that expended an energy charge of approximately 750 giga electronvolts (GeV), which points to the existence of a boson particle up to six times as large as the Higgs.

“It is a little intriguing,” ATLAS spokesperson Dave Charlton of the University of Birmingham, UK, said, via Nature.com, “But it can happen by coincidence.”

If the particle is not a “coincidence” and is confirmed to exist, it would be “a total game changer,” according to Gian Francesco Guidice, a CERN theorist not affiliated with ATLAS or CMS. “The Higgs boson pales in comparison, in terms of novelty,” he added.

While this new boson does not fit any theoretical model, nor was it one of the particles the teams at the LHC were looking for, Maxim Perelstein, a theoretical particle physicist at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, asserts, “I would not find it a big surprise if this turns out to be real.”