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However, a spokesman for Cern, which runs the LHC, confirmed the note was

authentic, but cautioned that it could turn out to be a false alarm as it had not been

held up to proper scientific scrutiny.

“What was leaked was the first stage in that process. At this stage we can’t take it

seriously and these things do come and go quite often,” the BBC quoted Dr James

Gillies, Director of communications, Cern as saying.

“It’s genuine, but what it comes from is a note written by a very small group of

people in a large collaboration. There will be working groups for individual physics

topics within those working groups and small teams of people will write notes for

scrutiny by their colleagues. If those notes survive scrutiny, which is often not the

case then the next stage in the peer review process is for them to go out to the

collaboration as a whole. If they survive that then the collaboration will say ‘we’ve

got something to go out to external peer review’,” Gillies added.

The result under discussion has originated from four members of the Atlas

collaboration. An Atlas is one of two “multi-purpose” experiments at the LHC,

designed to search for the Higgs and some 3,000 physicists are working on the

project.

The Atlas researchers targeted a mass region of 115 gigaelectronvolts (GeV),

where Higgs candidates had previously been observed by the LHC’s predecessor,

the Large Electron Positron (LEP) collider.

The researchers observed a so-called “resonance”, an effect that can be

associated with the presence of sub-atomic particles. But the number of events

seen by them was about 30 times greater than expected. (ANI)