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Physicists at Fermilab might have found evidence of a new elementary particle or an entirely new force of nature, suggesting the nation’s biggest science experiment is about to go out with a bang.
A new analysis of 10,000 proton-antiproton collisions at the Tevatron showed a weird result a couple hundred times — the numbers do not agree with the accepted theories of elementary particles and the forces that govern them. Post-collision jets of electrons and heavy particles called W bosons did not behave as they should.
The New York Times’ Dennis Overbye explains: “In about 250 times more cases than expected, the total energy of the jets clustered around a value of about 144 billion electron volts, as if they were the decay products of a hitherto unsuspected particle with that mass-energy.”
There are actually a few anomalies in the data, including asymmetrical behavior of top quarks. Together the data suggest a new particle, a new force or at the very least, new behavior among recognized particles and forces. This new particle could be a new boson, though not the elusive Higgs (the Higgs decays into heavier particles than this new thing does). One theory posted to the physics arXiv says it could be a new brand of Z boson. Another theory posits that it’s a heavy version of a gluon, the particle that glues quarks together, reports Science News.
Whatever it is has physicists pretty excited. Fermilab theorist Christopher Hill, who was not part of the team, told the New York Times: “If it is real, it would be the most significant discovery in physics in half a century.”

Science, Rebecca Boyle, fermilab, Higgs boson, lhc, particle physics, physics, quarks, standard model of particle physics, tevatronThe New York Times’ Dennis Overbye explains:

The quest for the elusive Higgs boson seemed over in April, when an unexpected result from an atom smasher seemed to herald the discovery of the famous particle — the last unproven piece of the physics puzzle and one of the great mysteries scientists face today. Scientists with the Tevatron particle accelerator at Chicago's Fermilab facility just released the results of a months-long effort by the lab's brightest minds to confirm the finding. What did they find? Nothing. 'We do not see the signal,' said Dmitri Denisov, staff scientist at Fermilab. 'If it existed, we would see it. But when we look at our data, we basically see nothing.