Fermi Lab's New Particle Discovery in Question 62
"Back in April physicists at Fermilab speculated that they may have discovered a new force or particle. But now another team has analyzed data from the collider and come to the exact opposite conclusion. From the article: 'But now, a rival team performing an independent analysis of Tevatron data has turned up no sign of the bump. It is using the same amount of data as CDF reported in April, but this data was collected at a different detector at the collider called DZero. "Nope, nothing here – sorry," says Dmitri Denisov, a spokesman for DZero.'"
old news? (Score:2, Informative)
Wasn't there a story on slashdot just last week about the people who released the data saying the same thing?
http://science.slashdot.org/story/11/06/10/1455240/Data-Review-Brings-Major-Setback-In-Higgs-Boson-Hunt
oh, I guess there was.
Already known? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:old news? (Score:4, Informative)
It is the same story. The older article just had a bad title.
Re:Already known? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Data sharing (Score:4, Informative)
Ex particles guy writing here --- the reason that data isn't immediately shared is that data acquisition and first pass analysis have to be done before you even *think* about looking for new physics. Moreover, the detector systems are complex enough, that it is really hard to be sure the analysis works correctly when you were the one who built the bleedin' thing. Then there's the other half -- almost no detector has complete coverage -- certainly none of the detectors at FNAL or CERN do so you are at the mercy of Monte Carlo simulations to work out the corrections. So you have to do the experiment twice; once is the physical world and once in a virtual world. Mismatches between the worlds can easily lead to spurious signals. Not saying that astronomy is any easier -- at least as its practiced now a days. And WMAP, for example, doesn't seem to be giving away the raw data. There is some turf protection -- "we invested blood sweat and tears as well as years of our lives to build the detector -- we get first crack at the data" -- I don't think that's a bad thing.
The particle physics community does have the equivalent of a star map it's the Review of Particle Properties (RPP).