CERN was on its way to discovering a particle that could have altered the way in which people think about the universe but a data 'bump' with the Large Hadron Collider at the institution has put paid to the plans and now the project has been put on hold. According to a report in the BBC, "Hopes for the imminent discovery of a particle that might fundamentally change our understanding of the Universe have been put on hold. Results from the Large Hadron Collider show that a "bump" in the machine's data, previously rumoured to represent a new particle, has gone away.The discovery of new particles, which could trigger a paradigm shift in physics, may still be years away.All the latest LHC results are being discussed at a conference in Chicago."
BBC spoke to David Charlton, who was the leader of the experiment known as Atlas and he stated that everyone at the institute was disappointed with the recent developments. ""There was a lot of excitement when we started to collect data. But in the [latest results] we see no sign of a bump, there's nothing.It is a pity because it would have been a really fantastic thing if there had been a new particle."
He also explained the big about the 'bumps' while speaking in Chicago at the International Conference on High Energy Physics (ICHEP), ."It just seems to be a statistical fluke, that the two experiments saw something at the same mass. Coincidences are always strange when they happen - but we've been looking very hard at our data to make sure we fully understand them, and we don't see anything in the new sample."
Another member of the ATLAS team, Prof. Jon Buttleworth of University College London said,"If you imagine we have landed on a new island of physics and we are scanning the landscape - if we don't see anything this year, it means that there are no amazing new civilisations with huge cities; there are no spectacular volcanoes there that we see with our first flyby.
"But it doesn't mean that there is not something hiding in the undergrowth that we will find later. It just means that we will have to do that slowly and carefully and really have to do our job over the next months and years."
