A What Surprised Scientists About the Discovery of Neutral Currents?

[arivero]

<Moderator's note: thread split off from https://www.physicsforums.com/threads/lhc-absence-of-supersymmetric-particles.917829/>

I wonder how unexpected, or not, was the discovery of neutral currents.

 

[mfb]

In 1973? They were predicted shortly before, they were not unexpected.
Flavor-changing neutral currents? Predicted 1973, found 2005 by CDF.

The https://home.cern/about/updates/2017/04/new-alice-results-show-novel-phenomena-proton-collisions is one of the few unexpected results.
Clear observations of tetraquarks and pentaquarks are nice as well.

 

[arivero]

I was thinking the events of 1973, and the famous 'Are you Salam?... Get into the car. I have news for you. We have found neutral currents.' A very epic narrative: first a wrong limit causes the models to be discarded, and then the experimental mistake is corrected, the model revives, and finally it is confirmed. Still, very different from SUSY, as Weinberg-Salam model had not generated any expectation (It would seem that the expectation was http://inspirehep.net/record/42770?ln=es Salam-Ward or https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.28.1494 Glashow-Georgi ) and then no frustration neither.