The battle over the heft of a hard-to-detect particle is heating up. What’s at stake? Only the leading theory describing all known matter in the universe.
A recalculation of the mass of an elementary particle, the W boson, has increased the tension between measurements from competing particle collider experiments. The ultimate outcome could bolster the standard model of particle physics, which describes the fundamental forces and quantum bits that make up everything we see in the cosmos. Or it could reveal signs of the standard model’s breakdown, depending on which lab’s answer prevails.
A reanalysis of old data from the Large Hadron Collider’s ATLAS experiment yields a W boson
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