Is This the Beginning of the End of the Standard Model?
Thoughts from a proper particle physicist on the recent announcement from the LHC…
Was yesterday the day when a crack appeared in the Standard Model that will lead to its demise? Maybe. It was a very interesting day, that’s for sure. [Here’s yesterday’s article on the results as they appeared.]
I find the following plot useful… it shows the results on photon pairs from ATLAS and CMS superposed for comparison. [I take only the central events from CMS because the events that have a photon in the endcap don’t show much (there are excesses and deficits in the interesting region) and because it makes the plot too cluttered; suffice it to say that the endcap photons show nothing unusual.] The challenge is that ATLAS uses a linear horizontal axis while CMS uses a logarithmic one, but in the interesting region of 600-800 GeV you can more or less line them up. Notice that CMS’s bins are narrower than ATLAS’s by a factor…
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In the Dark 
December 18, 2015 at 12:07 pm
Do any of these results point hypotheses toward redefining these particles as observational consequences of a process?
This is cited by experts in history of science as marking particularly significant theoretical change, e.g.: heliocentrism & evolution.
December 19, 2015 at 11:00 am
A question mark in the title tends to suggest that the answer will be ‘no’. The BICEP2 debacle shows the dangers of science by press release. Perhaps it is still better to wait for peer review before going public?
December 20, 2015 at 2:19 pm
That is what we have referees for.