Lifeboat Foundation

Scientists are trying to work out if a strange new particle, dubbed a “ghost particle”, has been detected at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Switzerland.

Using the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) instrument on the particle accelerator, the team said they had seen a signal that could be a particle that’s twice the mass of a carbon atom. But as the particle does not fit known theories, it could cause a bit of a stir if it exists. Their findings, which have not yet been peer-reviewed, are available on arXiv.

“I’d say theorists are excited and experimentalists are very skeptical,” Alexandre Nikitenko, a theorist on the CMS team who worked on the data, told The Guardian. “As a physicist I must be very critical, but as the author of this analysis I must have some optimism too.”