No New Particle Discovery at the Tevatron

Department: 
The Cosmos
Teaser: 

"Doomed Tevatron denied chance to go out with a bang as new particle is declared a false alarm"

Source: 

Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk Download time: Jun 10 2011 9:17 AM ET

Hopes of an imminent discovery at a US particle collider appear to have been dashed after an independent team of scientists found no evidence that a new particle had been created at the laboratory.

Parts of the physics community have been on tenterhooks since April when researchers working on the Tevatron collider at Fermilab near Chicago reported preliminary evidence for what seemed to be an unknown particle.

A bump in the data collected by the CDF group at the machine, which smashes protons and antiprotons together, pointed to the existence of an unidentified particle that might be linked either to a new force of nature, or a theory known as supersymmetry, which calls for every known type of particle to have a heavy and elusive partner.…

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