It's a huge week for politics. Something BIG is happening in the world of Physics, too!

[girl gone mad]

I know we're all super busy right now making sure that we get Barack Obama and all of our state and local candidates elected on Tuesday.

If you have any interest in Physics, you may want to bookmark this and come back to it after Wednesday.

Something major recently went down at Fermilab. (No troll. This could potentially be "hugh!!1!")

http://arxiv.org/abs/0810.5357

We report a study of multi-muon events produced at the Fermilab Tevatron collider and recorded by the CDFII detector. In a data set acquired with a dedicated dimuon trigger and corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 2100 pb^-1, we isolate a significant sample of events in which at least one of the muon candidates is produced outside of the beam pipe of radius 1.5cm. The production cross section and kinematics of events in which both muon candidates are produced inside the beam pipe are successfully modeled by known QCD processes which include heavy flavor production. In contrast, we are presently unable to fully account for the number and properties of the remaining events, in which at least one muon candidate is produced outside of the beam pipe, in terms of the same understanding of the CDFII detector, trigger, and event reconstruction. Several topological and kinematic properties of these events are presented in this paper. These events offer a plausible resolution to long-standing inconsistencies related to b-bbar production and decay.

It may be that they observed a new particle. One that behaves in a rather unexpected fashion.

No current model of 'new physics' (the crazy sounding stuff they frequently talk about on PBS and Discover) predicted this kind of signature in advance.

If this effect is real, it would constitute the first evidence of physics beyond the Standard Model, ever.

There is some good discussion going on around the web:

http://cosmicvariance.com/2008/11/02/cdf-ghost-muons/
http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=1045

Interesting times...

[BrklynLiberal]

1. K & R for later perusal.. thanks for posting.

[byronius]

2. Ooooo. New particles.

[billyoc]

3. I KNEW IT!! Space, here I come...

Ohh... yeah...

[bertman]

7. What're those little antenna thingies for? Looks like Legolas' girlfriend maybe.

[99th_Monkey]

4. This is one of the reasons I love DU. Helps with connecting the dots ...

... in nearly real time ... K&R for posting this .. fascinating stuff indeed.

[POAS]

5. More aptly "connecting the muons"

:)

[Leftist Agitator]

6. Outside of the beam pipe?

Methinks that production of such a muon indicates a quantum tunneling effect orders of magnitude greater than has previously been observed or thought possible. If these new muons are metastable (in comparison to ordinary muons, of course) then a very interesting possibility for muon-catalyzed cold fusion results.

[roguevalley]

8. ah. boldly going where no one has gone before. up the beam pipe.

:-D

[girl gone mad]

9. New Scientist picked up the story late today:

I think they did a better job putting it in layman's terms than I was able to. The emphasis below is mine.

Has new physics been found at the ageing Tevatron?

While engineers at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) race to fix its teething problems and start looking for new particles, its ageing predecessor is refusing go silently into the night.

Last week, physicists announced that the Tevatron particle accelerator at Fermilab in Batavia, Illinois, has produced particles that they are unable to explain. Could it be a sign of new physics?

The Collider Detector at Fermilab (CDF) monitors the particles that spew from collisions between protons and anti-protons, which are accelerated and smashed head-on by the Tevatron. The collision occurs inside the 1.5-centimetre-wide "beam pipe" that confines the protons and anti-protons, and the particles created are tracked by surrounding layers of electronics.

In this instance, the CDF was looking at bottom quarks and bottom anti-quarks that decay into, among other things, at least two charged particles called muons.

The team was in for a big surprise. First, they saw far more muons coming from the collisions than expected. But crucially, some of these muons seemed to have been created outside of the beam pipe: they had left no trace in the innermost layer of the detector.

The CDF team says it is unable to explain such muons using the standard model of particle physics, or from what they know of their detector.
Unknown particle

However, "we haven't ruled out a mundane explanation for this, and I want to make that very clear", says CDF spokesperson Jacobo Konigsberg, who adds that it is important that other experiments verify the effect.

While the CDF team is circumspect, theoreticians are more willing to speculate. If the signal is not spurious, this means that some unknown particle with a lifetime of about 20 picoseconds was produced in the collision, travelled about 1 centimetre, through the side of the beam pipe, and then decayed into muons.

"A centimetre is a long way for most kinds of particles to make it before decaying," says Dan Hooper of Fermilab. "It's too early to say much about this. That being said, if it turns out that a new 'long-lived' particle exists, it would be a very big deal."

http://space.newscientist.com/article/dn15115-has-new-physics-been-found-at-the-ageing-tevatron.html

[clear eye]

10. I'm just a layperson, but it sounds like they are saying

that the shape of space and the connections between different points of it (topology) explain the appearance of one of a linked pair of muons (dimuons) outside the expected location. Could be very important since there is lots of conflicting theories on the topology of space right now (how many dimensions it has, for example) and the existence of paralell universes. Another step on the road to the TOE.