From Gizmodo, April 7, 2022: A collaboration of 400 researchers have precisely measured the mass of the W boson and to their surprise found that the boson is more massive than predicted by the Standard Model of particle physics. All the data was collected from experiments at the four-story-tall, 4,500-ton Collider Detector (CDF-II for short) at Fermilab’s Tevatron accelerator.
W boson
From the BBC, April 7, 2022: Scientists of the CDF collaboration have found a tiny difference in the mass of the W Boson compared with what the theory says it should be – just 0.1%. If confirmed by other experiments, the implications could be enormous and could challenge the Standard Model of particle physics.
Scientists of the Collider Detector at Fermilab collaboration have achieved the most precise measurement to date of the mass of the W boson, one of nature’s force-carrying particles. The measured value shows tension with the value expected based on the Standard Model of particle physics.
The annual Universities Research Association Thesis Award recognizes outstanding work for a thesis conducted at or in collaboration with Fermilab. Zhang’s winning Ph.D. dissertation included insights into both physics searches and equipment upgrades at the Large Hadron Collider’s CMS detector. Fermilab serves as the U.S. hub for CMS.
From CERN, Jan. 26, 2021: This week marks the 50th anniversary of the first proton collisions in CERN’s Intersecting Storage Rings, the first hadron collider ever built. To celebrate, see hadron colliders of the last half-century — including the Tevatron and the Large Hadron Collider — through a historical lens, with an eye toward the quest for high luminosity and new energy frontiers.
A recent observation of an extremely rare subatomic process allows scientists to test the Standard Model’s boundaries.
Scientists on an experiment at the Large Hadron Collider see massive W particles emerging from collisions with electromagnetic fields. How can this happen?
Scientists on Large Hadron Collider experiments can learn about subatomic matter by peering into the collisions and asking: What exactly is doing the colliding? When the answer to that question involves rarely seen, massive particles, it gives scientists a unique way to study the Higgs boson. They can study rare, one-in-a-trillion heavy-boson collisions happening inside the LHC.
From Brookhaven National Laboratory, Feb. 12, 2018: Fermilab scientist Bo Jayatilaka is quoted in this article on ATLAS’s measurement of the mass of the W boson, a particle that plays a weighty role in a delicate balancing act of the quantum universe.
The world’s most precise measurement of the mass of the W boson, one of nature’s elementary particles, has been achieved by scientists from the CDF and DZero collaborations at the Department of Energy’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory.