NEVER mind the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, its ageing predecessor may have discovered a new and unexpected kind of particle. The announcement last week from the Tevatron particle accelerator at Fermilab in Batavia, Illinois, provided some excitement amid the frustration of ongoing repairs to the LHC.
The Tevatron smashes protons and anti-protons together at high speed inside a 1.5-centimetre-wide "beam pipe". Particles created by the collision are tracked by surrounding layers of electronics, whose output is then examined by researchers working on the Collider Detector at Fermilab project. In this instance, the CDF team was looking at bottom quarks and bottom antiquarks, whose decay products include at least two charged particles called muons.
The team was in for a big surprise. Firstly, they saw far more muons coming from the collisions than expected. But crucially, some of these muons seemed to have been created outside the beam pipe: they ...
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