Ghost in the Machine: Atom Smasher's 'New Particle' Was Illusion

The ATLAS detector in the Large Hadron Collider picked up this jet of particles (yellow

and green bars) when protons collided at energies of 13 TeV. Credit: CERN, ATLAS When you're searching high and low for your lost keys, sometimes the places where you don't see them can help you narrow down where they might be. In science, the search for new physics often takes a similar path. In December 2015, scientists at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) — the world's largest particle accelerator — thought they may have seen a hint of a brand-new particle, and with it, a window into physics beyond what scientists know now. But the findings turned out to be ghosts, a statistical fluke. Yet despite the negative result, the fact that there is nothing there shows that reigning theories of particle physics are working remarkably well, experts said. But that result only deepens the mysteries physicists are trying to solve, and pushes them to find out just where new particles or forces could be hiding. [The 9 Biggest Unsolved Mysteries in Physics]                      https://www.livescience.com/55728-atom-smashers-new-particle-was-illusion.html