<story><title>Hints of an unexpected new particle could be confirmed within days</title><url>http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/is-particle-physics-about-to-crack-wide-open</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>Trombone12</author><text>What a shitty article. First of all, the excesses presented in December are more noteworthy because they demonstrated how much information flows between the supposedly &amp;quot;independent&amp;quot; general experiments. In December the global CMS excess (the one that matters) was 1.2 sigma, but heyoo a little bird told us ATLAS sees a 2 sigma global excess at the same place so into the slides it goes! So much for independence...&lt;p&gt;Since then there was an update in march where ATLAS still sees a global significance of 2 sigma and CMS is down below 1. Local significances are up though CMS has pushed their 2.6 to 2.8, and ATLAS has gotten their 3.6 sigma into 3.9 (Both have also added a new model for interpreting this, I&amp;#x27;m just giving the largest sigma values reported). The reason improvement is so modest is because there hasn&amp;#x27;t been any new data on account of the LHC being set in the &amp;quot;off&amp;quot; position.&lt;p&gt;Anyway, the reason the OP article is such crap is that it doesn&amp;#x27;t mention any details about the rumour it is so clearly based on. Perusing more technical rumourmongers I find a mention of a 4.7 sigma excess in an ATLAS analysis that wasn&amp;#x27;t approved in time for the big conference in March. So if the article is based on that rumour, it is about three months old by now. But we can&amp;#x27;t tell, since the author wusses out on even saying what detector will &amp;quot;CRACK PARTICLE PHYSICS WIDE OPEN&amp;quot;... -_-</text></comment>
<story><title>Hints of an unexpected new particle could be confirmed within days</title><url>http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/is-particle-physics-about-to-crack-wide-open</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>pdonis</author><text>Unfortunately, this sort of linkbait headline has become typical for Scientific American (which is one of the reasons I haven&amp;#x27;t subscribed for years). As has already been pointed out in these comments, the Standard Model is already believed to be incomplete by particle physicists, and discovering a new particle in this general energy regime is exactly what everyone has been hoping for for a couple of decades now. Yes, such a new particle is not included in the Standard Model--because there hasn&amp;#x27;t been any experimental evidence for one. If this discovery pans out, particle physicists will finally be able to start model building again the way it was done when the SM itself was built: based on good experimental data.</text></comment>