We want to call your attention to the possible detection of a particle – the W boson – in data from the Chicago area Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory’s Tevatron collider. Now turned off, the experiment ran until 2011 and its wealth of data is still being searched for the signatures of particles popping and out of existence. The W boson is part of the weak force and is involved in a variety of decay processes. Measuring the masses of bosons like the W boson and the more famous Higgs boson is key to testing our current understanding of particle physics.

And while the Higgs boson is everything we ever expected, the data from Fermi hint at the W boson being much heavier than previously thought. If this is true, it opens the door for new physics and requires rethinking old ideas.

The results being looked at only come from one facility. At Fermi, protons and anti-protons accelerated into one another and produced cascades of particles that researchers had to piece together so they could say, “These resulting particles all came from the decay of this one unstable thing that had this one mass.” 

This is not easy, and while the data looks good, that doesn’t mean it is certain. We look forward to other accelerators repeating the experiment, and for now, we remain open to both the possibility that everything is as it should be with the universe – and Fermilab was wrong – and to the possibility that we were wrong and everything needs to be rethought because Fermilab is right.

More Information

Fermilab press release

Elementary Particle’s Unexpected Heft Stuns Physicists (Scientific American)

“High-precision measurement of the W boson mass with the CDF II detector,” CDF Collaboration, 2022 April 7, Science