Ghostly muons just ghosts - March 18, 2009
The Tevatron show at the 'ski meetings' in Europe continues. Last week, the collider's two main competing experiments, CDF and D0, united to identify a region of masses where the Higgs can't exist.
This week, the news is that D0 says that a strange excess of muons also doesn't exist -- which puts the experiment at loggerheads with CDF, which, in the fall, published its strange muon signal after it couldn't explain the signal away. Muons are a heavier cousin to the electron, and, if the signal is real, it could be a harbinger of new physics.
But the D0 result would put the kibosh on that. However, the D0 result is preliminary, says Quantum Diaries Survivor, who had the scoop. The experiments are very different and will take some time for D0 to exactly match what CDF filtered for, or for CDF to figure out why they've got an anomaly.
