Almost 100 manuscripts have been submitted following last week’s tantalizing announcement from CERN.
Social media started going crazy on the 15th of December, abuzz with the rumor of finding a boson heavier than the elusive Higgs Boson. Something must be up because since then 95 research manuscripts have been posted to the preprint server arXiv discussing the hypothetical particle.
It all started when scientists working at the particle accelerator reported a very interesting signal, although we’re not quite sure what to make of it yet. Tiziano Camporesi, a spokesperson for the LHC’s CMS experiment, told Nature that he expects even more papers to come up in the near future.
“I am extremely curious to see what our theorist friends will cook up,” he said.
Gian Francisco Giudice, a physicist from CERN published a 32-page paper analyzing the findings from CERN at the same time public announcements were made. His paper already has 68 citations, although the statistical significance of these findings seems relatively low.
Lisa Randall of Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts says that studying this signal is time well spent.
“It doesn’t necessarily hurt for people to think about what would give you such a signal,” she says. “Even if the signal goes away, you often learn a lot about what’s possible.”