The past five days have been interesting for the CDF experiment. First, their paper appeared on the arXiv [1] – a voluminous tome – which, if one was patient enough to read carefully, suggested that they have some excess of multi-muon events which appear to initiate far from the collision point of their proton/anti-proton beams. Some un-modeled detector effect? Some mis-understood mis-identification of other particles as muons? Could this be the first blatant collider signature of new physics?
I don’t know. I’m still working my way through this paper. As one Babar colleague remarked, “It’s like reading a BAD!” A BAD – BaBar Analysis Document – is a long, internal document which records all the steps and mis-steps of an analysis before it is written into a paper and published. They vary in length from 30 to 200 pages – yes, 200 pages – and they can be a joy (or, what’s the opposite of “joy”?) to read. This thing is a pre-print, on a complicated analysis, and it’s going to take time to digest it.
Of course, that didn’t stop other people from putting out a paper suggesting that this is new physics [2]. Yikes.
Today, a Physics World article appeared to confirm some of the rumors we had heard. A large fraction of the collaboration didn’t sign their names to the paper, feeling it was premature. That, in and of itself, doesn’t mean the work is off the mark; nor do the authors appear to make wild claims about what they see. It just means that the rest of us need to approach this paper with a careful eye, and not go jumping at ghosts.
[1] http://arxiv.org/abs/0810.5357
