What will be the mass of the first detected BSM particle, in eV?
6
59
160
2030
1b
expected

If a detection is widely contested, I will use my (somewhat conservative) discretion. In the event of no detection by close time, this will resolve to MKT.

Any mass outside the range will just resolve to the appropriate limit.

The rough masses of various standard model particles:

  • 0: photon, graviton (as far as we know)

  • < .12 eV: neutrino

  • 500 KeV: electron

  • 1 GeV: proton, neutron

  • 125 GeV: Higgs

  • 173 GeV: top quark (heaviest SM field)


Miscellaneous clarifications (all the rules about resolution that I think are unlikely, but I'd like to specify in advance to avoid people getting upset).

  1. If two or more detections are announced simultaneously, I'll take the geometric mean of their masses. Particles that are massless get treated as 1eV in this procedure, just as they would be if detected alone.

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bought Ṁ10 of HIGHER

The range for this should go much higher. Why is the upper limit for the range much lower than the heaviest SM particles?

predicts LOWER

@JosephNoonan Huh? The top mass in the range is 1TeV. What SM particle is heavier than that?

predicts HIGHER

@ScottLawrence The graph looks like it only goes up to 10 GeV. I think it's just an issue with how the graph is displayed on numeric markets, though.

predicts LOWER

@JosephNoonan ah. It displays that way for me on mobile but displays correctly on desktop

Open to suggestions about how this should resolve in the case of multiple simultaneous detections. Right now I'm planning on taking the geometric mean after truncating the masses to the range shown. So, if a massless particle and a 1GeV particle are announced in the same paper, this would resolve to ~30keV.

@ScottLawrence massless is outside of range and should not be included unless it is the only one

@LivInTheLookingGlass Why? Massless is only outside the range because I needed to pick some finite range, and figured that any discovery with mass ~1eV would be difficult to distinguish from massless anyway, so might as well draw the line there. This market is certainly not meant to ignore the possibility that the first discovery might be massless.

For instance, how should I resolve if the mass is reported as "0.5eV -0.3eV + 0.8eV"? So now the point estimate is under 1eV, but the error bars easily go above 1eV. Seems obvious that such a particle should be included.

@ScottLawrence You know, that's fair enough. Objection retracted

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