New boson appears in nuclear decay, could break standard model if confirmed
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
https://arxiv.org/abs/1910.10459
They claim a 7.2 sigma result, but the distribution of the null-hypothesis (called PDF(exp) in the paper) was determined from simulations of one atomic transition and "external pair creation on the target backing", and the only source of systematic error they took into account was the position of the target relative to the beam-line. It seems a little paltry to me in terms of trying to take into account possible sources of error... And given that the excess appears in only a particular angular region, they seem to be ignoring the Look-elsewhere effect ("oh, no excess signal here? Let me look elsewhere...") and over-stating their significance. The paper also is riddled with spelling and grammar mistakes, and while that doesn't have anything to do with the science, it does say something about the sloppiness of the researcher, I think.
Anyway, I can't imagine this passing the muster of peer-review in its current state. But I'll be curious to see the revised paper with more details included (if they can actually get it published).
EDIT: They did explain how they determined the background distribution, I edited my comment above.
I have reviewed many papers that were originally quite badly written, but were not bad papers at all. Many non-native speakers are bad at English, so they rely on some external editing service, and they do not want to pay this service until the paper has been properly reviewed and they have made the proposed changes. Of course it does not send a good signal, but the content of the article should not be judged in basis to that.
ArXiv pre-prints are pretty normal in physics and math.
>> that doesn't have anything to do with the science, it does say something about the sloppiness of the researcher, I think.
Interesting. BTW, Krasznahorkay is a highly-cited researchers.
Correct, and they are usually followed up by a published, peer-reviewed paper as well. I look forward to the day this one also gets reviewed and published.
Higgs boson discovery pre-print: https://arxiv.org/abs/1207.7214 Higgs boson discovery paper: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S037026931...
It's essentially the same text.
>> BTW, Krasznahorkay is a highly-cited researchers.
Great
Ergo, you can treat it as more significant than a random physics crank posting on his blog, but not as trustworthy as something that has in fact been properly vetted.
https://home.cern/news/news/physics/plot-thickens-hypothetic...
I am more than welcome to be proven wrong though!
This news is a little crazy and I don't think people 'not being sold on it' should stop people trying.
It will be an incredible change, if something else happens: that's really all, I'm not pushing some agenda.
You don't have to believe they they exist, they were quickly and conclusively disproven. As I recall, GPS was used as a time source and there was timer inaccuracies on Earth due to relativistic effects.
I feel something simular to what we see here, the problem is trying to tie everything else that we know back into it.. I say problem but I really mean excitement to understand a bit more!
Again, this could all be completely wrong and it could even draw down to a bad input along the chain, but the idea is definitely something worth investigating!
Remember, the Higgs Boson brought us the imagination of changing a light particle (photon) to a particle with mass.. It's a quite wacky idea if you look at it from a point we knew many moons ago!
> ”...breaks Standard Model”
SMH
I was solidly in the "C++" column back then, but have since become a data scientist who now uses numpy/Python for all machine learning. That talk was a very interesting, helped me to understand what they're doing in my old field these days. Thanks for sharing.
Reader beware.
There is nothing wrong with being hyped about a potential find. I will remain excited without passing assumptions!
[0] https://www.quantamagazine.org/new-boson-claim-faces-scrutin...
I'm thinking back to the team that had the result that appeared as if it was faster than light communication (IIRC). Even they didn't fully buy into their result but they published because they checked it every way they could think of and couldn't explain it. As I recall, the underlying error was pretty interesting on its own and in some sense contributed something new to our understanding of "how not to be wrong".
I keed, I keed... but I'm also partially serious. There's been a ton of theories over the years that would produce new particles, whose only flaw is that those particles weren't found. It wouldn't be at all surprising if there are past theories that with just a little tiny sensible tweak will turn out to contain this particle, and possibly also some other explanation as to why it wasn't found until now. In a sense, that's just a rephrasing of the fact that particle physics has been starved for data over the past couple of decades. No shortage of ideas, but no data to test them against. It really wouldn't be that surprising that several of the tons of ideas will be able to easily accommodate this new data, even as others are completely destroyed by it.
How does this actually work? Presumably it's a very small amount of lithium. What is it held in? How are the protons so accurately steered towards it? The accelerator ring is comparatively very wide, right?