[Shivan Hunter]

http://tech.slashdot.org/story/11/04/06/188246/Fermi-Lab-May-Have-Discovered-New-Particle-or-Force

"If it is real, it would be the most significant discovery in physics in half a century."

#include <stdphysicsjoke.h>

Can someone more knowledgeable than I am about particle physics shed some light?

[General Battuta]

It's a possible detection of something strange going on in (iirc) quark decay, may represent a 'new force' though perhaps not literally a new force.

[Kopachris]

Something to do with the Weak force.  This has no effect on your day-to-day life, but it might have an effect on your eventual annihilation by worldwide nuclear warfare.

[Polpolion]

Something to do with the Weak force.  This has no effect on your day-to-day life, but it might have an effect on your eventual annihilation by worldwide nuclear warfare.

Uh oh, will this mean we'll have to avoid worldwide nuclear warfare now? Dang, so much for my hopes and dreams...

[Nuke]

i think what he means is how do we use this discovery to make are warhead yields bigger.

[General Battuta]

Harvested this summary from io9 comments

Quick thoughts:

1.. It's a 3-sigma effect, which means it's statistically unlikely to be a fluke. BUT it could be. So it needs confirmation.

2. What it looks like is a particle at around 150 GeV. If true this would be a particle not in the Standard Model.

3. It's not the Higgs.

4. Jet asymmetries. Slam a proton and an antiproton together, quarks go bang. Heavy particles are created and decay. You look at the resulting jets (kind of like a stream of debris) and work out what properties the heavy particles must have had. In this case the jets are not behaving as expected, there's some kind of interaction going on with the quarks that go into making the meson jets, leading to a directional asymmetry.

5. There's almost certainly going to be a lot of chatter about "new forces of nature," rather misleadingly saying there's something new alongside gravity, electromagnetism and the strong and weak nuclear forces. AFAIK this isn't what people are talking about. If it exists then this particle might be (say) a massive gauge boson which is an *extension* of the standard model - something like the Z' boson (Z-prime) which is still part of the electroweak interaction, turns up in models with an extra gauge group, and does interesting things involving turning one flavor of quark into another. So something like the Z' might be turning up, messing with the quarks, and causing the jet asymmetry. (Not saying it is the Z'.)

6. So it's not a new fundamental force, but it just *might* be indication of interesting physics extending the Standard Model. Which is cool.

[IronBeer]

Got an uncle who's a technician over at Fermilab. Oughta drop him a line.

Cool story, bro. Definitely going to pay attention.

[watsisname]

http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/1104/1104.0699v1.pdf <-- Original publication, full of SCIENCE... and a 3-page-long list of investigators.

[Luis Dias]

3 sigma is not impressive, at least in particle physics (let alone the softer sciences...).

But here's another pov from a physicist:
http://motls.blogspot.com/2011/04/fermilab-cdf-new-force-press-conference.html

It's being marketed as a new, unexpected version of the Higgs boson with mass around 144 GeV (technipion from technicolor theories - see a paper by Kenneth Lane et al. tomorrow), a new force such as one from a light leptophobic Z' boson (it's not a prediction - this hep-ph paper written a month ago tried to explain the top-antitop asymmetry but it already knew about the "today's" signal from Viviana Cavaliere's thesis, too), stop squark in R-parity violating (i.e. ugly version of) supersymmetry, and so on. It can't be a Standard Model Higgs because that would be decaying to a bottom quark-antiquark pair.

Lisa Randall and especially Neal Weiner are quoted as the enthusiasts; Nima Arkani-Hamed doesn't disappoint and remains a cautious conservative skeptic he has become in recent years. ;-) In Nima's opinion, the result is probably an artifact of how the data were sliced, diced, spliced, mashed, and splashed. If someone cares, radical communist and feminist Tommaso Dorigo is being conservative, too.

On Thursday, an Israeli physicist commented on TRF that the main peak is incorrectly shifted by one bin - so the whole observed effect may be a pile-up effect. That's a more detailed version of Nima's "splicing" comment.

Joe Lykken who has also written Z' boson SUSY papers and who is quoted at the end doesn't avoid the comment that the discovery - with the amount of data that is 4 times larger - could appear around the day when the Tevatron's funding stops in Fall 2011. In this way, Lykken reminds us that given the important looming changes in the funding, experimenters around CDF spokeswoman (to use a politically correct language) with an optional penis Giovanni Punzi could naturally become "more sensitive" to similar "bumps".

A new Z prime boson

While a "splicing dicing artifact" is a likely option, I am not going to claim that it is impossible for a new Z' boson to be this light and have the required properties. If such a new particle exists, however, it will be another stunning example of "Who ordered that?".

etc.

[General Battuta]

Three sigma is fine for an exploratory result in a field with controlled conditions and excellent for a field with nonlab conditions. Three sigma is taken as strong evidence, five sigma is the gold standard for a discovery.

[Luis Dias]

Three sigma is fine for an exploratory result in a field with controlled conditions and excellent for a field with nonlab conditions. Three sigma is taken as strong evidence, five sigma is the gold standard for a discovery.

Yeah, that's what I've heard elsewhere too, and a good correction to my remark.

[Mongoose]

Subatomic physics is a hell of a drug.  Also, it has the strangest (lol) naming conventions I've come across in any field.

And dear lord, that paper is almost unreadable from a formatting standpoint with that massive list of contributors.  It's kind of fun to see that professionals really do use LaTeX and Origin to write up their stuff, though.