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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."
"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
...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)
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.
SIGSEGV caught, terminating
wait... not that kind of sig.
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.
SIGSEGV caught, terminating
wait... not that kind of sig.
The real test is to come up with the hypothesis first, then collect the data.
That's not the way the vast majority of science is done. Popper was a philosopher speaking in ignorance (but I repeat myself).
The challenge for these guys is not in the hypothesis testing, but in the cuts. You have to come up with some set of criteria for selecting "good" events in complex detectors of this kind. There is always a degree of arbitrariness in how you do that, and there have been cases in the past (the so-called 'GSI particle') where people tweaked and tuned multi-dimensional cuts to maximize peaks in the data.
In the present case it is clear their cuts are physics-based--they are described in the paper--and that the peak structure is consistent with the resolution one would expect (the GSI particle required some very weird physics to make the narrow peak widths plausible.)
However, the peak is also precisely in the region where their background spectra are varying most rapidly, and this is a huge red flag. It makes them sensitive to any number of minor mis-calibrations. It does NOT mean the phenomenon is not real, but if I had to make a bet on it being physics beyond the standard model or an instrumental artefact, my money would not be on new physics.
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.