New findings regarding W boson contradicts understanding of universe

Scientists have made new findings regarding the W boson, a fundamental particle, in a new research published in the Science journal.

The study shows that it has a significantly greater mass than previously theorised in the Standard Model of particle physics.

During the research, more than 400 scientists scrutinised four million W boson candidates out of a "dataset of around 450 trillion collisions" for over over 10 years.

Ashutosh Kotwal, a physicist at Duke University who led the study, said the Tevatron collider in the US state of Illinois was used for the research in the beginning.

"In this framework of clues that there are missing pieces to the standard model, we have contributed one more, very interesting, and somewhat large clue," Kotwal said.

After a decade of meticulous measurements, scientists found that collisions were made by smashing particles together at mind-bending speeds. They used the Collider Detector at Fermilab (CDF) for the collection of data.

The new theory is "probably the most successful scientific theory that has ever been written down" as per Harry Cliff, a particle physicist at Cambridge University who works at the Large Hadron Collider.

"It can make fantastically precise predictions. It's like a house of cards, you pull on one bit of it too much, the whole thing comes crashing down," he told the AFP news agency.

''This is either a major discovery or a problem in the analysis of data,'' said Jan Stark, physicist and director of research at the French CNRS institute.

He also predicted "quite heated discussions in the years to come".

In the study, scientists determined the W boson's mass twice in size in comparison to the previous prediction. It had seven variations called sigma.

"The chances of getting a five sigma result by dumb luck is one in three and a half million," said Cliff.

"If this is real, and not some systematic bias or misunderstanding of how to do the calculations, then it's a huge deal because it would mean there's a new fundamental ingredient to our universe that we haven't discovered before," he said.

"But if you're going to say something as big as we've broken the standard model of particle physics, and there's new particles out there to discover, to convince people of that you probably need more than one measurement from more than one experiment."

(With inputs from agencies)