The ATOMKI group had claimed to find various other new particles earlier in 2016 but abandoned these claims later, without an explanation of what caused the spurious signals. Efforts by CERN and other groups to independently detect the particle have been unsuccessful so far. Late 2019 a follow-up paper was published in Acta Physica Polonica B. Skepticism Īs of December 2019, the ATOMKI paper describing the particle has not been peer reviewed and should therefore be considered preliminary. This was covered in science journalism, focusing largely on the implications that the existence of the X‑17 particle and a corresponding fifth force would have in the search for dark matter. Krasznahorkay (2019) posted a preprint announcing that he and his team at ATOMKI had successfully observed the same anomalies in the decay of stable helium atoms as had been observed in beryllium-8, strengthening the case for the existence of the X‑17 particle. As of 2019, several research experiments are underway to attempt to validate or refute these results. The force may explain the g − 2 muon anomaly and provide a dark matter candidate. (2016) proposed that a "protophobic" X boson, with a mass of 16.7 MeV, suppressed couplings to protons relative to neutrons and electrons at femtometer range, could explain the data. The result was successfully repeated by the team. This indicated that a small fraction of beryllium-8 might shed its excess energy in the form of a new particle. Particles and a combined energy of approximately 17 MeV. Excess decays were observed at an opening angle of 140° between the In an effort to find a dark photon, the team fired protons at thin targets of lithium-7, which created unstable beryllium-8 nuclei that then decayed and produced pairs of electrons and positrons. In 2015, Krasznahorkay and his colleagues at ATOMKI, the Hungarian Institute for Nuclear Research, posited the existence of a new, light boson with a mass of about 17 MeV (i.e. The NA64 experiment at CERN looks for the proposed X17 particle by striking the electron beams from the Super Proton Synchrotron on fixed target nuclei.
The X17 particle could be the force carrier for a postulated fifth force, possibly connected with dark matter, and has been described as a protophobic (i.e., ignoring protons) vector boson with a mass near 17 MeV. The particle has been proposed to explain wide angles observed in the trajectory paths of particles produced during a nuclear transition of beryllium-8 atoms and in stable helium atoms. The X17 particle is a hypothetical subatomic particle proposed by Attila Krasznahorkay and his colleagues to explain certain anomalous measurement results. We also provide an overview of possible future experiments probing pair production in the $A\,$=$\,4$ system at a number of candidate subatomic particle as the cause of anomalous measurement results near 17 MeV X17 particle Composition While electromagnetic interactions are treated to high orders in the chiral expansion, the interactions of the hypothetical boson with nucleons are modeled in leading-order $\chi$EFT (albeit, in some instances, selected subleading contributions are also accounted for). The ab initio calculations use exact hyperspherical-harmonics methods to describe the bound state and low-energy spectrum of the $A\,$=$\,4$ continuum, and fully account for initial state interaction effects in the $3+1$ clusters. We consider several possibilities, that this boson is either a scalar, pseudoscalar, vector, or axial particle. Next, we examine how the exchange of a hypothetical low-mass boson would impact the cross section for such a process. We first analyze the process as a purely electromagnetic one in the context of a state-of-the-art approach to nuclear strong-interaction dynamics and nuclear electromagnetic currents, derived from chiral effective field theory ($\chi$EFT). The present work deals with $e^+$-$e^-$ pair production in the four-nucleon system.