A paper that could explain the mysterious “ghost particles” inside one of the world’s leading high-energy physics experiments has ignited a blog debate on who knew what and when.
Last week, we reported on the discovery of mysterious “ghost muons” by an experiment known as the Collision Detector at Fermilab (CDF). CDF is looking at proton-antiproton collisions at the Tevatron, a particle accelerator located at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Illinois. In a nutshell, it’s seen higher numbers of muons than expected—a possible sign of some sort of new physics that nobody’s seen before.
There’s been plenty of blogging speculating on what this signal might mean. But there’s also been a bit of a spat over whether some theorists had advanced knowledge of the findings. Specifically, the above paper by Neil Weiner and Nima Arkani-Hamed was posted on 6 October, about a month before the CDF announcement, and appeared to provide a theoretical framework that could explain the muon anomaly. That led physicist-blogger Tommaso Dorigo to accuse the theorists of trading insider information.
The exchange escalated until string theorist and co-author Arkani-Hamed weighed in with a thoughtful but firm refutation of what he described as “completely baseless and deeply offensive accusations”. Arkani-Hamed pointed out that the work was not particularly compatible with the CDF results, and had instead been designed to support data from previous experiments, including a claim of excess anti-electrons (aka positrons) by an Italian space experiment called PAMELA. Many other bloggers have voiced their opinions on Dorigo’s blog, and Seth Zenz at the US LHC blog even wrote his own post on what I’m going to start calling “muongate”.
It’s worth pointing out that PAMELA was itself the centre of a controversy in September, after two theorists published papers based on the experiment’s unreleased data, which they photographed at a conference. Such is the brave new world of research in the digital age.
Image: CDF/Fermilab