A simulation of the creation of a Higgs boson in the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN

According to a study, the W boson does not obey the rules of the most accepted theory of quantum materials. While the findings are yet to be confirmed, they are already reactivating ‘the search to try to explain unknown phenomena’.

One of the world’s biggest particle accelerators has produced a troubling result: the mass of the W boson – a fundamental particle that is crucial for our understanding of matter and the universe – is not what it should be.

If these results are confirmed, “it has to be because there is a new mechanism in nature that we are not aware of,” explains Ashutosh Kotwal, a researcher from Duke University in the United States and the leader of the study. This mechanism “could manifest itself in the form of a particle or an interaction inside the atomic nucleus that we may discover in future experiments,” he adds. Hundreds of researchers have participated in the work, which involved the 12 different countries that contribute to the CDF II experiment, at the Tevatron particle accelerator in the United States...

El País: Results from particle accelerator hint at ‘new mechanism in nature’