Decay anomaly at the Large Hadron Collider hints at potential new particles - Polidicks

[quote]A penguin-shaped anomaly first detected two years ago has survived a comprehensive new analysis of data from the first run of CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC), scientists revealed today at a meeting in La Thuile, Italy. The anomaly, an unexpected measurement of rare particle decays called “penguin processes,” isn’t statistically significant enough to constitute a discovery, but if the signal strengthens in the LHC’s upcoming second run, it will imply the existence of new elementary particles beyond those of the Standard Model — the precise but incomplete equations that have governed particle physics for 40 years. “What we find is that this anomaly has persisted,” said Guy Wilkinson, a physicist at the University of Oxford and the spokesperson for the LHCb collaboration, which first detected the statistical bump in penguin decays in 2013. “This is extremely interesting.”[/quote] [url]https://www.quantamagazine.org/20150320-penguin-anomaly-hints-at-missing-particles/[/url] [url]http://home.web.cern.ch/about/updates/2015/03/lhcbs-new-analysis-confirms-old-puzzle[/url] Not very high confidence yet, but repeated tests have shown the anomaly. Neat.

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[QUOTE=Samg381;47369108]Interesting how wildly inaccurate some of our scientific assumptions can be.[/QUOTE] I think this kinda doesn't do justice to how accurate the Standard Model [I]is[/I]. No one thinks it's the the final word (no gravity, massless neutrinos, obvious defects) but considering how damn [I]difficult[/I] it was to develop (glance through any quantum field theory textbook and cry) it does an incredible job. Quantum electrodynamics, which is just part of the Standard Model, remains probably the most accurately verified theory in all of science.

[QUOTE=Samg381;47369108]Interesting how wildly inaccurate some of our scientific assumptions can be.[/QUOTE] reducing the Standard Model to "scientific assumptions" seems terribly insulting to those who have worked on it

[QUOTE=JohnnyMo1;47369046][url]https://www.quantamagazine.org/20150320-penguin-anomaly-hints-at-missing-particles/[/url] [url]http://home.web.cern.ch/about/updates/2015/03/lhcbs-new-analysis-confirms-old-puzzle[/url] Not very high confidence yet, but repeated tests have shown the anomaly. Neat.[/QUOTE] What sort of level of confidence do they have right now?

[QUOTE=NeonpieDFTBA;47369249]What sort of level of confidence do they have right now?[/QUOTE] The Quanta article mentions it: 3.7 sigma. [editline]21st March 2015[/editline] That is not actually considered a "significant discovery" in particle physics generally, but it corresponds to a 99.98% chance that it is not simply caused by statistical fluctuations.

[QUOTE=JohnnyMo1;47369307]The Quanta article mentions it: 3.7 sigma. [editline]21st March 2015[/editline] That is not actually considered a "significant discovery" in particle physics generally, but it corresponds to a 99.98% chance that it is not simply caused by statistical fluctuations.[/QUOTE] The only stats work I have done is in psychology using p<0.05 (4 practicals, 0 significant results) :v: With that I assume it is reasonable to expect it to become a discovery once it turns back on.

[QUOTE=NeonpieDFTBA;47369573]The only stats work I have done is in psychology using p<0.05 (4 practicals, 0 significant results) :v: With that I assume it is reasonable to expect it to become a discovery once it turns back on.[/QUOTE] From what I understand 5 sigma is normally the safe zone used for officially calling it a discovery and 3 sigma is the safe zone for evidence

[QUOTE=NeonpieDFTBA;47369573]The only stats work I have done is in psychology using p<0.05 (4 practicals, 0 significant results) :v: With that I assume it is reasonable to expect it to become a discovery once it turns back on.[/QUOTE] This is handy curve to understand sigma confidence (The percentages under the curve are probabilities of error): [IMG]http://www.regentsprep.org/regents/math/algtrig/ats2/normalcurvesmaller.jpg[/IMG]

I think it is amazing that we were able to reduce pretty much the entirety of everything into 13 particles in the first place.

[QUOTE=JohnnyMo1;47369307]The Quanta article mentions it: 3.7 sigma. [editline]21st March 2015[/editline] That is not actually considered a "significant discovery" in particle physics generally, but it corresponds to a 99.98% chance that it is not simply caused by statistical fluctuations.[/QUOTE] How does the sigma system work, and how is something assigned a percentage that it's correct?

[quote]A penguin-shaped anomaly[/quote] hold on...we're talking about quantum penguins here? i love how quantum mechanics is all explained by animal shaped charts or animal based thought experiments. i had no idea penguins were as quantumly linked as cats are [editline]21st March 2015[/editline] [t]http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c5/Penguin_diagram.JPG[/t] said diagram of anomaly

[QUOTE=Sableye;47370808]hold on...we're talking about quantum penguins here? i love how quantum mechanics is all explained by animal shaped charts or animal based thought experiments. i had no idea penguins were as quantumly linked as cats are [editline]21st March 2015[/editline] [t]http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c5/Penguin_diagram.JPG[/t] said diagram of anomaly[/QUOTE] they should call one of the new particles noots

I may be articulating this wrong but, what if we just keep finding more elementary particles that build the fundamental particles in the Standard Model, and what if we find the building blocks of THOSE particles? What if there's an infinite amount of building blocks upon building blocks?

[QUOTE=TheHydra;47370884]they should call one of the new particles noots[/QUOTE] Nootrinos

[QUOTE=Rents;47370930]Nootrinos[/QUOTE] Not quarks, noot leptons, noot bossons

The universe is made of tiny penguins, apparently. Huh, fancy that. [quote]Penguin decays were so named by the physicist John Ellis in 1977; when a loss at darts obliged him to use the word “penguin” in his next academic paper, he noticed that diagrams of the decays discussed in the paper happened to resemble the flightless birds.[/quote] Well, at least the bet wasn't for something dirtier. "Scientists at the LHC believe they may have found evidence of a new particle thanks to a rare buttsex decay!"

[QUOTE=QwertySecond;47370769]How does the sigma system work, and how is something assigned a percentage that it's correct?[/QUOTE] I don't actually know how they're determined (I'm not experimentalist or statistician) but the "sigmas" correspond to standard deviations on a normal distribution. To say that a measurement has 3.7 sigma confidence means that the likelihood that it's just statistical accident is the same as the likelihood that a measurement of some value conforming to a normal distribution will be further than 3.7 standard deviations away from the mean. After I figured out the percentage 3.7 sigma earlier, I wrote a little Mathematica function that translates sigmas into a percentage chance that it's statistical error. Yay, laziness!

[QUOTE=Last or First;47371083]The universe is made of tiny penguins, apparently. Huh, fancy that. Well, at least the bet wasn't for something dirtier. "Scientists at the LHC believe they may have found evidence of a new particle thanks to a rare buttsex decay!"[/QUOTE] The Wikipedia article elaborates even more than this (quite a humorous anecdote it seems), [QUOTE]Mary K. [Gaillard], Dimitri [Nanopoulos] and I first got interested in what are now called penguin diagrams while we were studying CP violation in the Standard Model in 1976... The penguin name came in 1977, as follows. In the spring of 1977, Mike Chanowitz, Mary K and I wrote a paper on GUTs predicting the b quark mass before it was found. When it was found a few weeks later, Mary K, Dimitri, Serge Rudaz and I immediately started working on its phenomenology. That summer, there was a student at CERN, Melissa Franklin who is now an experimentalist at Harvard. One evening, she, I, and Serge went to a pub, and she and I started a game of darts. We made a bet that if I lost I had to put the word penguin into my next paper. She actually left the darts game before the end, and was replaced by Serge, who beat me. Nevertheless, I felt obligated to carry out the conditions of the bet. For some time, it was not clear to me how to get the word into this b quark paper that we were writing at the time. Then, one evening, after working at CERN, I stopped on my way back to my apartment to visit some friends living in Meyrin where I smoked some illegal substance. Later, when I got back to my apartment and continued working on our paper, I had a sudden flash that the famous diagrams look like penguins. So we put the name into our paper, and the rest, as they say, is history.[/QUOTE]