A new, more accurate measurement of the mass of the W boson has been obtained at Cern in Geneva that contradicts the one with which Fermilab in Chicago shook up world physics in 2022 by postulating a flaw in the Standard Model theory that describes elementary particles and fundamental forces. The W boson, which was discovered by Carlo Robbia in 1983 and is crucial to processes such as radioactive decay and nuclear fusion, cannot be measured directly: information can be obtained by measuring the mass and energy it releases as it decays. “Because there are undetected neutrinos in the particle decay, measuring mass is among the most challenging and accurate measurements made at hadron colliders,” says particle physicist Andreas Hooker of CERN’s ATLAS experiment team. Thanks to a new statistical approach, his group re-examined data obtained in 2011 with the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), and arrived at an estimate of the mass of the W boson that was 16% more accurate and with a smaller margin of uncertainty. . According to the new calculations, the boson’s mass would be 80.360 GeV, a value much closer to that predicted by the Standard Model (80.357 GeV) than calculated by the US researchers (80.4335 GeV). New measurements are expected to confirm these data not only from the Atlas experiment, but also from Cms and Lhcb.
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