Rumor of the Week

A few months ago, CDF, the New York Times by releasing results claiming to see a resonance in the invariant mass spectrum of two rays produced together with a w. last week, they released a new analysis with twice as much data, alleging that the signal was still there, now at a statistical significance of almost 5 sigma.

I recently wrote about this here, the reasons for his skeptical, despite the high statistical significance. A very good reason for being a skeptic is that the CDF Tommaso Dorigo is not that this is really believe, go so far as to put his money where his mouth is, offering a $ 100 bet to back up his arguments. The crucial question in everyone's mind is been or D0, CDF of competition and sister detector at Fermilab, would the same thing in the data. If there really is something there, D0.

This Friday, there will be a wine and cheese talk on Fermilab D0, where the results will be revealed, and you can use this as a live video stream here. But, as one would expect, now that the D0 result is ready to be revealed, people do things like print jobs late on printers, etc., allowing editors to spread rumors. Blogs like this seem to be a place where such information tend to end up, so I can report a rumor (based on excellent sources) that Tommaso's right. D0 will on Friday report that nothing is there, that they have no evidence for a dijet resonance in the region of 110-170 GeV. They reject the CDF hypothesis of a resonance with a diameter of 4 OJ on a significance level of more than 4 sigma.

In other news, the LHC performed very well, with the official purpose of this week to achieve an integrated luminosity of fb-1, something that has been the official goal for the entire year (though, unofficially, 2-3 fb-1 if the more). Right now, they are around 8 fb-1. This kind of clarity should finally start to results that a Higgs in the region that are expected to exclude or see first indications if, in the next few months.

The KITP this week marks the beginning of a program on the first year of the LHC. Unfortunately, theorists, the only result data from the first year of the LHC had to shoot some of their favorite models, ruling from, for example, a large amount of parameter space where supersymmetry was expected to be found, which is the most popular theoretical idea of the last 30 years are considerably less popular. The first interview held at the KITP Program was this afternoon, and not with the LHC data, but with the alleged CDF resonance (it appears that news of the D0 result had not yet made it to Santa Barbara).

Update: the KITP talk is now available here.