Thanks for the helpful explanations. What is your opinion on Bob McElrath’s suggestion above that the explanation will turn out to be unknown B-hadrons with anomalously long lifetimes, and do you have the necessary raw data that would be required to disentangle the contributions of different unknown B-hadrons, and analyse exclusive final states as he suggests?

Best regards,
Chris

Can you clarify this statement?

Would you have a problem with the claim that the essential difference between a particle and an antiparticle is the sign of the rate of change with time. (So for an energy eigenstate, this rate of change, ie the frequency, is either positive or negative, giving us particle or anti-particle)? Or would you say such a characterization in fundamentally misguided?

If we assume this characterization is correct, is the point then that a B meson
- is not in fact an energy eigenstate AND
- unlike most “simple” non-eigenstates. if we were to plot “phase” (in some vague sense) against time, rather than seeing some variety of sinusoid like a beat pattern, the plot is best done showing a complex point against time, with the point moving first clockwise, then slowing down, stopping, moving anti-clockwise, then the whole thing reversing?

a third of the collaboration objected about the publication process, the paper content, the personality of the main author, and the day of the week of the release.

The thing is, the main author is a brilliant physicist, with zero PR skills. He alienated most of his colleagues during 25 years of work in CDF. This explains some of the reaction to his analysis.

The analysis itself is complicated, as John states from the outset above. It entails loosening the criteria of identification of muon candidates, which have a good reason to be there. But still, we need to understand our muon candidates even with loose cuts. This leads us to this sample, which is very hard to reconcile with SM sources. Many in CDF thought that we should keep to ourself our dirty laundry, others thought we should release that information.

Cheers,
.

This paper along with Sean’s recent paper and with other conjectures and hypotheses on DM do hint that DM might in some way reflect a weakly interacting ghost world that couples to our “gauge world” by gravity and very weakly by other interactions.

Lawrence B. Crowell

That said, getting this rate would be a challenge!

Neal

I think the answer is clear: some currently unknown B-baryon or B-meson (or maybe several) has an anomalously large lifetime. The lifetime is only a factor of 10 over the B meson, so a B-hadron is an obvious choice. These states are not in Pythia and will not show up in your MC. Most of the B-baryons are unknown. These things definitely are in the sample, the only question is whether there is anything in there that’s not B-hadrons, and why does the state have an anomalously long lifetime.

A more specific analysis need to be done looking at exclusive final states to identify the B-hadrons. The paper has a lot of plots which clearly mix a lot of different signals coming from different mesons, so it’s extremely hard to interpret them. The only thing that’s clear is that there is no new state with a 2-body dimuon decay (which B-decays aren’t anyway). But discovering a pile of B-hadrons not in the PDG is exciting!

Carl, we’ll look at electrons soon. Electrons in jets are a bitch to reconstruct, though. Muons are much easier.

One would certain expect muon production to have at least some electrons, but more importantly, the cosmic ray people have been talking about Centauros (anti-Centauros) for years. In those events, a single incoming particle creates a shower of hadrons (electromagnetic) stuff which is out of balance with the usual expectation of pi+, pi- and pi0 in roughly equal abundance.

This sentence didn’t quite parse:

In the analysis presented in the paper, the authors (a group from Frascati/Harvard led by Paolo Giromini) have ostensibly resolved a long standing disagreement between the results two different methods to measure the b pair cross section.

Is “results” a stray word that should have been removed during editing?

Somehow it’s appropriate that this work should be drawing attention right around Halloween.

Thanks for the additional info

nice post. I do think this is a very weird background, but indeed, the 1% or so chance that it instead is new physics (my very own gut feeling) makes this a very exciting thing.

I am sorry that 33% of our colleagues chose to not sign this paper. I think it was due to dissatisfaction with the publication procedure rather than with the content of the paper. I do not know about you, but I have the feeling that many of your and my colleagues in CDF did not read the paper and the documentation closely enough. For me, the fact that scrupolous and knowledgeable physicists such as Kevin, Doug, and others have found no clear problem with the results is a guarantee that it deserved to be published.

So, let’s look forward to very interesting times.

Cheers,
T.