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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."
Still kinda miss the Superconducting Super Collider . Wonder if it could have produced results sooner.
Consciousness is an illusion.
Lunchtime doubly so.
If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter?
Then shut up.
I said salvia not alcohol. Drinking wont allow you to experience and appreciate death.
Spoken like a man who's never drunk himself to death.
William of Ockham had no beard. The most likely explanation is that it was chewed off by squirrels every morning.
It shall henceforth be known as the pleaseExtendOurFunding-ion.
OK, I jest. On a more serious (but related) note, back in 2000, when the LEP at CERN was shutting down, there were possible "hints" of the Higgs' Boson and pleas to extend the running time (which were ultimately denied so that the LHC would not be delayed).
Struggling to find a day everyone can make? WhenShallWe.com
"Physicists at Fermi Lab have found a 'suspicious bump' in that there data that could indicate they've found a new elementary particle or even a new force of nature."
Fixed
I can't, it's not part of my predestined thoughts :/
Ah, but does your brain exist? If not, then maybe the universe was never there to begin with.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
When I read things like "In about 250 times more cases than expected, the total energy of the jets clustered around a value of about 144 billion electron volts" I get nervous.
This is like saying that in a series of 1M coin tosses the sequence HTTHHTTTTHHTTHHH came up 100x more often than would be expected by chance. Does that mean that any particular sequence of 8 tosses should come up 1/65536th of the time, and this one came up 1/655th of the time, or does it mean that some random sequence of results should come up 100% of the time in a random series of 16 coin tosses, and we happened to pick the random series that came up the most often in that particular set of data?
If I mine a big set of data against 100 random hypothesis I'll be able to find about 5 that I can show to be true with 95% confidence, despite the fact that there is nothing really going on.
The real test is to come up with the hypothesis first, then collect the data.
Now, these guys are probably smart, and hopefully control for this. If you want to test for 100 hypotheses and REALLY have 95% confidence, then you need to target a confidence of 1-0.05^100 for each test - at least that is how I see it (being a complete novice at statistics).
A person who smoked salvia said that a black hole in reality opened up and their soul was sucked into it. Meanwhile physicists claim that black holes suck in matter and light and it can never escape.
Maybe if more physicists smoked Salvia they'd have a better natural understanding of the universe. They would understand that salvia is an alien lifeform, a plant brought to the earth by the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greys to consume our souls. They would understand that our reality is an illusion and that this force they just discovered is the salvia force, the ultimate proof of alien life. The universe and existence is fake, accept it. You don't have consciousness, you are just a biological machine, please accept it.
Oddly enough, your post is as worth reading as the 40+ posts that came after it. You may have proved a point. God know what it is (maybe on some quantum scale you are proving that insanity is sanity at the same time) but, well done old chap.
I went to battle M.C. Escher, but drew a blank.
Did we finally find the Unstoppable Force?
Slashdot has just opened up to a new demographic I think.
Who, crazy people? No, they've been here for years.
...to the paper, as opposed to the commentary by PopSci on the article written by NYT by someone who really didn't know what the hell they were talking about.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
You sir, need to find a more competitive source for LSD.
A meaningless statement. In order for something to be considered an illusion you must consider the possibility that something can be deceived. And in order for that something to be deceived, it must be conscious.
Happy people make bad consumers.
FWIW, earlier drafts of the paper were much more sensationalistic than the final draft that the collaboration approved. A large contingent of the collaboration, myself included, would have removed our names from the paper if it had done something as insane as claim discovery of a new particle. So, we specifically pushed to make the paper more scientifically honest and less effective as a "ploy to keep the funds flowing." That said, the NYT article and all the other mainstream news reports on the issue are far, far more sensationalistic than anything the analyzers ever even considered producing...
Some interesting things to note:
So, long story short, there is certainly something here to be interested in. Both the theorists who write the Monte Carlo generators and the experimentalists analyzing data from the LHC experiments are paying close attention to this result, as it affects their work. We will know more after further study and work, both to improve the Monte Carlos and to look for similar effects in the ATLAS and CMS data.
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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.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heim_theory is an alternate model of particle physics that does a pretty good job of predicting the mass of fundamental particles mathematically.
What's the predicted mass of the neutral electron particle? It's 0.51617049 MeV/c.
I would strongly advise reading the actual paper (can be found on the arxiv) instead of the NYT article, which, as I mentioned, is sensational and largely content-free. There is plenty of information in the paper about how they determined the significance of the result and how the analysis (event selection etc) was done. It should answer your questions in this regard. As far as being "new", the data from these experiments is analyzed in scientifically and statistically rigorous ways all the time. It in no way involves "massaging" the data, which you can see if you read the hundreds of papers that have come out of high energy physics experiments.
I really can't comment professionally on the sterile neutrino re dark matter. I've heard of the MiniBOONE result, and think it is very interesting, but the viability of a sterile neutrino as dark matter is pretty far afield for me. Perhaps a passing cosmologist can comment?
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They are not really the same/related, nor are they likely to be correct.
The Z' proposal is by Dan Hooper, who neglects the fact that CDF has already excluded the possibility of a Z' with a mass below 800 GeV [http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-ex/0602045]. He is also the same guy who, while not being a member of the Fermi Gamma Ray Space Telescope collaboration, used their data to "discover" dark matter not once but twice! I've become extremely skeptical of his work, as he seems excitable and prone to early and ill-considered pronouncements.
The technicolor proposal is a little bit more interesting. Technicolor models were a proposed alternative to the Higgs mechanism for electroweak symmetry breaking, involving an additional SU(3) symmetry (that is, an additional force/interaction akin to the strong nuclear force). This was proposed very early on in the process of this paper by a Fermilab theorist who was consulted under confidentiality because the analysis was not yet finalized and approved by the CDF collaboration. The proposed process here is a techni-rho which decays to a W and a techni-pion. The W then goes to a lepton and neutrino, and the techni-pion goes to two jets.
Nearly all of the parameter space for technicolor models has long since been excluded, but there are a few tiny corners of modified versions of the model that are still available. While it does not seem likely that technicolor will end up being the correct explanation (this is far more likely a modeling problem in W+jets than new physics), technicolor will probably be used extensively to test whether or not this is new physics. It is already implemented in most of the Monte Carlo generators, and the model is quite generic in its properties, so it really makes a very good testbed.
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