Fermilab's Ghost in the Machine

Fermilab’s Tevatron collider is picking up something unexplainable. Particles aren’t behaving like they should.

It has to do with the top quark, one of the fundamental particles. It sounds simplistic in a way, but when particles collide and shoot off quarks and their anti-quark partners, they should favor one particular direction by enough as to be statistically significant (five-percent). Well, they’re actually favoring that particular direction (doesn’t much matter which) by closer to 15-percent. Not a huge amount, but it’s enough that researchers at the lab can’t explain it with any known physics.

"It's really challenging for us to construct a convincing theory to explain this," said theorist Susanne Westhoff on Fermilab’s Symmetry Breaking blog. "All of the proposed explanations involve a new particle."

The Higgs boson wouldn’t do this, researchers say. It’s something totally outside the purview of what we understand or even think we understand. Something heavy and, importantly, unseen. Note that this doesn’t mean these things are floating around in the universe right now and fucking with things—most likely, it doesn’t even exist in the universe anymore, but did exist in the way high-energy state of the universe close to the big band. Which is what colliders are, in a sense, meant to simulate.

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Image: if we could actually see a top quark.