Sunday 26 June 2011

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The big news from the past few days is the release of more data by CDF which is still a bump in the invariant mass of two beams produced with a w. Resonaances gives an excellent description of this and the possible meaning. Tommaso Dorigo remains a skeptic.

I can't do better than the two of them on this story, but here's my summary to take on the situation:

With the new data, this may no longer be written off as a statistical fluke. 3 sigma you can claim off as such a fluke, but not 5 sigma.

The main reason to be skeptical but it is not the statistical significance, but the possibility that this is due to poor modeling of background. The signal is extracted from a huge background, so a small misunderstanding of the background would be the cause. If this is the case, expect that the new data does not change anything, you have to continue to see the effect as more data is analysed.

The fact that Tommaso a skeptic is carries much weight, as he is on the CDF experiment works and understand the problems. In general, the experimentalists to experiments that they are working on to make great discoveries, so tend to have their own results optimists. When someone skeptical about the outcome of their own experiment, that gives a break.

What would really be the case for the new physics here would be more compelling if the result is confirmed by one of the other experiments (DO at Fermilab, CMS or on the LHC ATLAS) that able to see the same effect as it's there. These groups have a certain motivation to confirm not only their competition from the discovery (raise the question why they don't find it first), but in a convincing way to shoot it down. This post by Pauline Gagnon of ATLAS says that they have nothing in their data 2010. It is expected that D0 is hard at work and should quickly free what they have found. ATLAS and CMS must also hard at work looking for the much larger 2011 examples. We will soon know the results, but the public comments from Dorigo and Gagnon not sounds to me like they would if they knew their experiments provisional confidential results confirm the CDF anomaly.

Finally, while there are numerous paper theory models out already with alleged explanation for this, are not really convincing. This is not an experimental result with theoretical explanation a naturally attractive.


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