Finding a New Physics
The Large Hadron Collider, the world’s most powerful atom smasher, may be only months away from finding a new elementary particle—a sign of a new force in nature—recent studies suggest.
Contradicting the Standard Model of particle physics, top quarks, which remain undiscovered, fly off too often in the direction of the proton beam and not enough in the antiproton direction. “Researchers are truly abuzz about the possibility that the proposed particle could be within the grasp of the Large Hadron Collider, near Geneva. If the asymmetry arises from some new type of particle just slightly too massive for the Tevatron to produce, the LHC could produce the particles directly, possibly by the end of 2011, says Markus Schulze of Johns Hopkins University.”
