There have been some very surprising headlines out this week about an experimental confirmation of the detection of a new type of boson (force carrier) that seems to be associated with a fifth force. This could be a gigantic discovery with far-reaching implications, so it's prudent to be cautious before embracing this discovery just yet. But after the first detection of the X17 particle, reported in 2016, it seems that nobody has found any flaws in the experiments or the associated analysis, and now the same team of Hungarian particle physicists are reporting another detection of this particle under different conditions - so it's starting to look pretty exciting.
We're going to spend the next couple of weeks reading the papers about this so we can record a Physics Frontiers episode about it, and I thought some of you might like to see them for yourselves, so here are the links:
"New evidence supporting the existence of the hypothetic X17 particle," Krasznahorkay et al., (undergoing peer review now), 2019
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1910.10459.pdf
"Observation of Anomalous Internal Pair Creation in 8Be: A Possible Indication of a Light, Neutral Boson," Krasznahorkay et al., Phys. Rev. Lett., 2016
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1504.01527.pdf
"Protophobic Fifth Force Interpretation of the Observed Anomaly in 8Be Nuclear Transitions," Feng et al., Phys. Rev. Lett., 2016
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1604.07411
And here's one of the many mainstream news articles about this for additional background and context:
A 'no-brainer Nobel Prize': Hungarian scientists may have found a fifth force of nature - CNN
We're going to spend the next couple of weeks reading the papers about this so we can record a Physics Frontiers episode about it, and I thought some of you might like to see them for yourselves, so here are the links:
"New evidence supporting the existence of the hypothetic X17 particle," Krasznahorkay et al., (undergoing peer review now), 2019
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1910.10459.pdf
"Observation of Anomalous Internal Pair Creation in 8Be: A Possible Indication of a Light, Neutral Boson," Krasznahorkay et al., Phys. Rev. Lett., 2016
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1504.01527.pdf
"Protophobic Fifth Force Interpretation of the Observed Anomaly in 8Be Nuclear Transitions," Feng et al., Phys. Rev. Lett., 2016
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1604.07411
And here's one of the many mainstream news articles about this for additional background and context:
A 'no-brainer Nobel Prize': Hungarian scientists may have found a fifth force of nature - CNN