LIKE lost car keys, a new fundamental particle could be lurking in the last
place anyone had thought to look for it.
Quirks in the radioactive decay of the well-studied nuclei of carbon and
beryllium hint at a completely unexpected particle, say nuclear physicists in
Germany. Other researchers are sceptical though.
Five years ago, Fokke de Boer and colleagues at the University of Frankfurt
reported possible signs of a particle called a pseudoscalar boson with a mass of
around 9 million electronvolts, 18 times the mass of an electron. Such particles
would resemble the “axions” that some theorists think make…
