Fermi Lab May Have Discovered New Particle or Force

schleprock63 writes "Physicists at Fermi Lab have found a 'suspicious bump' in their data that could indicate they've found a new elementary particle or even a new force of nature. The discovery could 'be the most significant discovery in physics in half a century.' Physicists have ruled out that the particle could be the standard model Higgs boson, but theorize that it could be some new and unexpected version of the Higgs. This discovery comes as the Tevatron is slated to go offline sometime in September."

Desertron

[Toe, The]

Still kinda miss the Superconducting Super Collider [wikipedia.org]. Wonder if it could have produced results sooner.

Re:Do they account for hypothesis-mining?

[The_Wilschon]

They did take into account the look-elsewhere effect, as is standard in bump-search type papers. This bump has a 3.2 sigma significance _after_ the look-elsewhere significance reduction and other systematic uncertainties.

Re:Hardly a Result

[The_Wilschon]

D0 has done this same sort of analysis, and they do not see this bump. But, their background modeling procedure involves reweighting the expected distributions (from Monte Carlo) in delta R between the jets (sort of an angular separation between the jets), which is a variable that is strongly correlated with the dijet mass. That is, their background model would be expected to have a strong tendency to fill in a bump like this. Now, which model is more correct is open to question, but it is certainly true that whether or not this bump turns out to be from real new physics (unlikely, in my professional opinion), their procedure is almost guaranteed not to find it.