Batavia (IL) - In a paper so potentially significant that only two-thirds of the physicists involved were willing to sign their name to it at this early stage, evidence is beginning to leak out that researchers at Fermilab may have discovered a new particle. While yet unnamed, the scientists are being extremely cautious moving forward. They've released a paper at this unusually early stage to help tame speculation and conjecture. It's being reported that no "Standard Model" accounts for the observations witnessed in 23% of collisions, a value too far outside the range statistical fluctuation to be mere coincidence.





Muon effects at 1.96 TeV



The scientists want to stress that uncategorized or unknown effects from their detector (or some other machine anomaly which may account for their observations) have not been ruled out. Yet. Research is continuing and the remaining one-third of the physicists withheld their names from the publication for that very reason until those anomalies are sorted out.



To sum up their findings briefly, the team observed extra muons when studying p-pbar collisions at energy levels of sqrt(s) = 1.96 TeV. They believe these extra muons are occurring because of an unusual and unexpectedly long-lived particle which was emitting them while it slowly decayed over something on the order of 20+ picoseconds, far longer than ever imagined.





Charting new territory



This finding, according to the published paper (link below), occurred in the background. The research team was conducting other impact research with primary findings focused on those collisions. Still, these second-hand observations have taken the physics world by storm. No existing model, not even alternate models which have only mild recognition or acceptance, appear to account for the observed effect. And while this is extraordinary, everybody involved is moving ahead absolutely cautiously.



Taken from the blog of Tommaso Dorigo, a Collider Dector physicist at Fermilab (CDF), "As far as I understand, no existing model of new physics predicted such a signature in advance, although one must acknowledge that a few ideas exist in the literature which might have a connection with the effect, if proven real."



Peter Woit, a Columbia University mathematician, noted this on his blog, "The exciting possibility here is that a new, relatively long-lived particle has been observed, one that decays in some way that leads to a lot more muons than one gets from Standard Model states. It should be remembered though that this is an extraordinary claim requiring extraordinary evidence, and the possibility remains that this is some sort of background or detector effect that the CDF physicists have missed."



Woit continues, "It should also be made clear that this paper is not a claim by CDF to have discovered a new particle, rather it is written up as a description of the anomalies they have found, leaving open the possibility that these come from some standard model processes or detector characteristics that they do not yet understand."





More research, long time



The scientists have indicated that conclusions based on the results they've obtained will take quite a while to fully sort out. Fermilab may also begin using their other detector, called "D0," in an attempt to verify the results, possibly requiring even longer to process the data.

While it's going to take some time to get to the bottom of this potentially revolutionary finding, the entire scientific community now has something really exciting to focus their energies on. It is likely stories of this nature will dominate scientific discussion until they are discounted or proven.





Fermilab



TG Daily's Wolfgang Gruener visited Fermilab in 2007 on a guided tour (with pictures). Until the Large Hadon Collider (LHC) in Geneva, Switzerland is repaired next Spring, Fermilab will remain home to the world's most powerful supercollider - Tevatron.



Fermilab has played host to at least three significant discoveries over its operational lifetime, including the Tau Neutrino and the doubly strange Omega-sub-b quark. Discoveries like these with relatively low power (compared to LHC's theoretical potential) are what get many people excited about the possibilities of even greater discoveries with LHC.



Read the original paper published by two-thirds of the physicists at arxiv.org.