Straws in the LHC wind: Lepton universality and an update on "that bump"

A couple of months ago I wrote about an anomalous bump in data from the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. This is one of a few little indicators we have from the data recorded over the past years, straws in the wind which, if we are lucky, are the first signs of a new breakthrough. Another such teaser comes from the LHCb experiment at CERN, as well as the Babar experiment in California. It is a rather different kind of hint than the bump. Before describing that though, there is also a minor update on the bump.

The bump is in the “diboson mass distribution”, and can be interpreted as tentative evidence for a new fundamental particle, beyond the Standard Model, with a mass about two thousand times that of the proton.