Task force

John Terning: "A task force is set up to get to the bottom of the discrepancy. The task force will include Fermilab theorists Estia Eichten and Keith Ellis."

Tropical interlude

While we wait for more information, here's Mina Aganagic on the other ostensible topic of this blog, tropical geometry.

Is it real? 2

CDF says it's real, D0 says it isn't. What's going on?

Phil Gibbs: "The differences are too subtle to see from just the visual image, and it does not help that they used different bins. There does appear to be significant differences in the backgrounds while the data look quite similar. If that is the case then the problem is purely theoretical and they just need to compare their background calculations. However, the detectors are different so perhaps the backgrounds should not look exactly the same. Only the people directly involved have enough details to get to the bottom of it."

Georgios Choudalakis (a member of CERN's ATLAS collaboration): "Since the 1st day, I was telling CDF they should re-examine their background, re-consider how systematics are taken into account, and not interpret the discrepancy as a Gaussian, because that was a biased interpretation, perfect to mislead theorists. The BumpHunter was telling me that the most discrepant excess was not a Gaussian, as claimed by CDF, but a broad excess between 120 and 250 GeV, which is the range where the background had a high slope. This was very strongly suggesting that the background was not centered right."

t prime and b prime

Jester suggests that the CDF bump might arise from a 300 GeV resonance which decays to a 150 GeV resonance. In comments, Daniel de França suggests that this could be one fourth-generation quark (t') decaying to another fourth-generation quark (b'). Alas, this very straightforward idea may be inconsistent with existing lower bounds on the mass of a fourth generation.

Dark matter

"Light dark matter in leptophobic Z' models". "Dark Forces At The Tevatron". And see the last paragraph of "Light Z' Bosons at the Tevatron", by the same authors (same, with an error of ±1).

ATLAS blips from TeV-scale strings

Lubos reports the possibility that the CDF bump, and some striking events recorded by ATLAS, might all be explained by TeV-scale strings if the string scale is 2.35 TeV.