US atom smasher may have found new force of nature

By Fabrice Coffrini

Physicists will announce Wednesday that data from a major US atom smasher lab may have revealed a new elementary particle, or potentially a new force of nature, one of the researchers told AFP.

The discovery is believed to relate to mass and how objects obtain it -- a persistent riddle to experts and one of the most sought-after answers in all of physics.

"There could be some new force beyond the force that we know," said Giovanni Punzi, a physicist with the international research team that is analyzing the data.

"If it is confirmed, it could point to a whole new world of interactions," he told AFP.

While much remains a mystery, one thing researchers agree on is that this is something beyond the "God Particle," or the Higgs-boson, a hypothetical elementary particle which has long eluded physicists who believe it could explain why objects have mass.

"The Higgs-boson is a piece that goes into the puzzle that we already have," said Punzi. "Whereas this is something that goes a little bit beyond that -- a new interaction, a new force."

For more than a year physicists have been studying what appears to be a "bump" in the data from the US Department of Energy's Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, which operates the powerful particle accelerator Tevatron.

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