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."

Comments

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.