Physicists discover never-before seen particle sitting on a tabletop

Columbia physicist calls out click-bait style abstract, by writing an article with it’s own click-bait title.

If this is supposed to be ironic it’s not working for me.

Another story of mixing up (misrepresenting in press releases and reporting) a solid-state physics result with a high-energy physics result.

And a "tabletop experiment" in physics refers to it being at room-scale or lab-scale, not looking for particles literally "on a tabletop".

I'm a bit confused by the article here. The author states

> The authors, who begin their abstract with

>> The observation of the Higgs boson solidified the standard model of particle physics. However, explanations of anomalies (for example, dark matter) rely on further symmetry breaking, calling for an undiscovered axial Higgs mode.

> which has nothing to do with the result in their paper.

But also in the abstract is

> Here, we discover an axial Higgs mode in the CDW system RTe3 using the interference of quantum pathways

Similarly, they call out a tweet that is actually by the last author of the paper which states the discovery of a new particle.

> Excited to report our latest @Nature discovery of __a new particle__, the Axial Higgs mode

So I'm not confused about the skepticism of discovering an Axial Higgs mode, but the article is about hype not the experiment. They should at least add that the author and lab is accountable as well as giving some evidence why this experiment is wrong. I'm not a particle physicist so I can't really make conjectures as to if the experiment is right or wrong, but considering that the authors are claiming to discover a new particle I'm not sure I really blame the media in this case (despite the overall messaging resonating with me as I see this happen a lot in my current field: ML). I agree that it doesn't look like a new particle is discovered here, but I think the authors are culpable here. Similarly Nature, where the reviewers should have had this foresight.

While that’s the title the post makes it clear: ‘Physicists didn’t Discover Never-Before Seen Particle Sitting on a Tabletop.’

Seems like editing the title might be reasonable.

There's a bit of history here where condensed matter physicists enjoy finding analogues and porting over mathematical ideas and theories applied primarily in higher energy particle physics. See: the humble skyrmion that started its life as a doomed particle physics model.

The rub here is calling is a Higgs MODE and specifically not a higgs particle.

The scientists aren't really at fault here, since it looks like within the field the Higgs mode is well understood and the main aim of these paper is other scientists.

Imagine the claim is justified, and pools of quantum fluids can transition into a phase that is decoupled from electromagnetic fields, and become dark matter. It would still be baryonic and would become ordinary matter just by heat. We don't have a lot of experience with what happens when quantum mechanical effects expand to a cosmological scale. Who would be surprised to find new physics there.

> “This result is almost elegant in its simplicity — it’s really rare to find a new particle with a super clean signature without a lot of fanfare,” said Prineha Narang, an assistant professor at Harvard and a principal investigator through the QSC, a U.S. Department of Energy National Quantum Information Science Research Center headquartered at DOE’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

Well, to be fair...

Should be retitled to indicate that the initial reporting was false.

Ah it was right there under my coffee cup the whole time!

Oh well ... at least it led me to learn more about Raman scattering today. And wonder about that as a possible explain for some FRB phenomenae.

Deleted ... misunderstanding.

/mea culpa/