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A gossip is floating around the physics community that the world's maximal corpuscle beauty haw hit perceived a long-sought subatomic particle titled the Higgs boson, also famous as the "God particle."

The controversial gossip is supported on what appears to be a leaked internal state from physicists at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), a 17-mile-long particle gun nearby Geneva, Switzerland. It's not every clear at this saucer if the state is authentic, or what the data it refers to strength stingy — but the state already has researchers talking.

The sound started when an nameless commenter recently posted an nonfigurative of the state on Columbia University mathematician Peter Woit's blog, Not Even Wrong.

Some physicists feature the state haw be a hoax, while others believe the "detection" is likely a statistical abnormalcy that module disappear upon further study. But the encounter would be a Brobdingnagian particle-physics breakthrough, if it holds up.

"If it were to be real, it would be really exciting," said physicist Sheldon Stone of Syracuse University.

Hunting for the Higgs

The Higgs boson is predicted to exist by current particle-physics theory, which is famous as the Standard Model. Physicists conceive the Higgs bestows mass on every the another particles — but they hit ease to support its existence.

Huge corpuscle smashers — like the LHC and the Tevatron, at Fermilab in Algonquin — are intelligent for the Higgs and another subatomic bits of matter. These accelerators shut particles together at large speeds, generating a descent of another particles that could include the Higgs or another elemental pieces predicted by theory but ease to be detected. [Wacky Physics: The Coolest Little Particles in Nature]

The leaked state suggests that the LHC's ATLAS particle-detection experiment haw hit picked up a mode of the elusive Higgs. The communication is consistent, in mass and another characteristics, with what the Higgs is expected to produce, according to the note.

However, whatever another aspects of the communication don't match predictions.

"Its production evaluate is much higher than that expected for the Higgs boson in the Standard Model," Stone told SPACE.com in an email interview. So the communication haw be evidence of whatever another particle, Stone added, "which in whatever significance would be modify more interesting, or it could be the result of newborn physics beyond the Standard Model."

Too presently to tell

Stone was hurried to saucer discover that the state is not an official result of the ATLAS investigate team. Therefore, speculating most its rigour or implications is decidedly preliminary.

"It is actually quite base and pseudoscientific to speech publicly most internal cooperation touchable before it is approved," Stone said. "So this 'result' is not a result until the cooperation officially releases it."

Other researchers connected Stone in urging cards and warn before getting likewise agog most the doable discovery.

"Don't worry, Higgs boson! I would never spread scurrilous rumors most you. Unlike whatever people," Caltech physicist Sean writer tweeted today (April 22).

While it's ease early, whatever researchers hit already begun to patch doubt on the doable detection. For example, Tommaso Dorigo — a particle physicist at Fermilab and CERN, which operates the LHC — thinks the communication is simulated and module drop upon closer inspection.

Dorigo — who said he doesn't hit access to the full ATLAS state — gives individual reasons for this viewpoint. He points out, for example, that scientists at Fermilab didn't see the putative Higgs communication in their Tevatron data, which covered kindred connector as the ATLAS experiment.

Dorigo feels strongly enough, in fact, to put his money where his representative is.

"I look $1,000 with whomever has a name and a estimation in particle physics (this is a needed specification, because I need to be sure that the person taking the look module honor it) that the communication is not cod to Higgs boson decays," he wrote on his journal today. "I am selection to look that this is NO NEW PARTICLE. Clear enough?"

You can follow SPACE.com grownup writer Mike Wall on Twitter: @michaeldwall. Follow LiveScience for the stylish in science news and discoveries on Twitter @livescience and on Facebook.

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