From New Scientist, Dec. 16, 2022: This year was another busy year in science and technology and New Scientist news editors’ have chosen some of the biggest scientific developments, discoveries and events in 2022. Included in this year’s selections is the April 2022 announcement of the mass of the W boson that used Fermilab’s Tevatron.
W boson
From Science News, August 15, 2022: W bosons are particles that transmit the weak force, which is responsible for certain types of radioactive decay. Last April, Fermilab researchers reported the W boson was more massive than predicted, hinting that something may be amiss with the standard model. Now a team of scientists with ATLAS at the LHC are reporting rare boson triplets which continues to test the standard model for any cracks.
Trillions of neutrinos pass through you (and the entire Earth) every second without interacting. How do they pull off this incredible feat? Physicist Kirsty Duffy explains the origin of the neutrino’s superpower on this episode of EvenBananas.
From PBS Space Time, May 25, 2022: Fermilab scientists spent almost a decade recording collisions in the Tevatron collider and another ten years analyzing data finding the W boson’s mass seems to be 0.01 percent heavier than expected. Now, understanding why the particle has mass puts the current Standard Model to the test.
From MSN (Spain), May 26, 2022: A series of precise measurements of well-known ordinary particles and processes have threatened to shake our understanding of physics from the Muon g-2 and W boson Fermilab announcements . Now the LHC is preparing to operate at a higher energy level and intensity than ever before, there is a chance that new particles are produced through even rarer processes or are hidden under backgrounds that we have not yet unearthed.
The CDF experiment at Fermilab measured the mass of the W boson and came up with an answer that no one expected.
From Nature Italy May 20, 2022: CDF co-spokesperson Giorgio Chiarelli tells the story of how Italy contributed to the measurement of the W boson mass, opening a door on new physics. For more than 10 years after the Tevatron detector at Fermilab produced the last crashes between protons and antiprotons, the collaboration announced the most precise measure of the W boson mass ever achieved.
From the Nature Briefing, May 13, 2022: Based on data recorded with the CDF II detector at Fermilab between 2002 and 2011 at the Tevatron, the collaboration reconstructed more than 4 million W boson candidates through their decays into an electron or muon accompanied by the respective neutrino. The CDF Collaboration stated their result “suggests the possibility of improvements to the standard model calculation or of extensions to it”.
Fermilab’s CDF experiment has recently announced a measurement of the mass of the W boson with unprecedented precision. Even more interesting, the measurement disagrees with theoretical predictions. If confirmed, this could be a very big deal. In this video, Fermilab’s Don Lincoln gives a far-ranging explanation of the measurement and its significance.
From AZO Quantum, April 11, 2022: The W boson, one of nature’s force-carrying particles, has been detected by the Collider Detector at Fermilab (CDF) team, which includes 400 scientists from across the world.