Given that small data samples are always prone to large statistical fluctuations, the experimentalists exerted much caution when they presented these results, clearly stating that any claim was premature.īut theorists, who have been craving for signs of something new for decades, jumped on it. The noon train, Jean-Paul Lemieux, National Gallery of Canadaĭue to the difficulties inherent to the restart of the LHC at higher energy, the amount of data collected at 13 TeV in 2015 by ATLAS and CMS was very limited.

But until more data become available, everybody will keep their eyes on that spot. Only time will tell if the indistinct shape barely visible above the horizon is the long awaited train or just an illusion. And just as I wrote in July 2011, it is as if we were trying to guess if the train is coming by looking in the far distance on a grey winter day. Will it be like with the Higgs boson, which was officially discovered in July 2012 but had already given some faint signs of its presence a year earlier? Right now, there is not enough data. No one knows yet if all this excitement is granted but it clearly illustrates how much physicists are hoping for a huge discovery in the coming years. Its mass would be around 750 GeV, that is, five times the mass of the Higgs boson. This flurry of activity started when the CMS and ATLAS Collaborations both reported having found a few events that could possibly reveal the presence of a new particle decaying to two photons. Since December 15, I have counted 200 new theoretical papers, each one suggesting one or several possible explanations for a new particle not yet discovered. #1 is the key step in the scientific method, but in this post we’ll illuminate what #2 actually entails. Theorists start figure out the broader implications if the anomaly is real.Other experiments find ways to cross-check to see if they can confirm the anomaly.One common scenario is that one experiment observes something unusual: an anomaly. Two things immediately happen:

So what is it that theorists do, besides sipping espresso and scribbling on chalk boards? In this post we describe one type of theoretical work called model building. This usually falls under the umbrella of phenomenology, which in physics refers to making connections between mathematically defined theories (or models) of nature and actual experimental observations of nature. In short, they seem to do all of the real science! The role of experimentalists is clear: they build and conduct experiments, take data and analyze it using mathematical, statistical, and numerical techniques to separate signal from background.

One thing that makes physics, and especially particle physics, is unique in the sciences is the split between theory and experiment. This post is cross-posted from ParticleBites. Hi everyone! It’s been a while since I’ve posted on Quantum Diaries.

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