(June 1, 2011 at 8:47 pm)popeyespappy Wrote: Technically speaking Phil you lost me at I. However there does seem to be some independent verification going on along the lines of your concerns.
In proton-proton collisions, you can create a single top quark which decays weakly to a bottom quark plus a W boson. The W can decay to a quark-antiquark pair, and because the energy in the colour fields between the quarks increases as they move apart, you get lots of quark-antiquark pairs created, and it's these that make up the hadronic jets.
The invariant mass of the bottom jet + 1 "weak jet" peaks at around 150GeV.
The problem is that in a particle physics experiment, if you want to say "this is what we expect to see based on the standard model", you have to build a computer simulation of your detector, and if you don't understand your detector as well as you could, then this is a possible source of considerable error.
The problem as I see it is that the CDF simulation doesn't predict the 2 weak boson peak (the red peak in the graph you linked) particularly well, implying that they don't understand their detector quite as well as they need to. But it will be interesting to see what the D0 data looks like!
Also, why would this break the SM if it did turn out be a Higgs signal? Am I missing something obvious here?
Galileo was a man of science oppressed by the irrational and superstitious. Today, he is used by the irrational and superstitious who claim they are being oppressed by science - Mark Crislip
