New particle !

[Xymox]

YES !!!!!!!!!!

I love it when things are not as expected...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-13000253

[CharmQuark]

Woohoo

Exciting stuff

[JGLambourne]

This is potentially the most important discovery in particle physics in the last decade. At last something not predicated by the standard model! It's well worth watching the full announcement video at

http://vmsstreamer1.fnal.gov/Lectures/W ... /index.htm

In contrast to the recent Higgs “discovery”, this analysis appears extremely thorough. Apparently they have been working on characterizing the backgrounds for the last 2 years.

[Kasuha]

It's still only three sigma. You can say "there's only 0.1% chance it's a fluke" or you can say "you get one such result out of every 1000 searches over completely random data".

And I hate sites which resize my browser window.

[DCWhitworth]

Well by analysing more data they got it up to almost five sigma, the accepted level for a discovery, but it appears to have all fallen flat as neither DZero, CMS nor ATLAS can replicate the observations of CDF.

Best guess appears to be that the effect has been caused by a flaw in the modelling of the background in the CDF analysis.

It's a sobering event and it shows that the 'sigma' level of a signal is not automatically 'proof' as the media seem to imply.