(Possibly) Mindblowing (Potential) Discovery at Fermilab

[John O.]

There's no rewriting the physics books just yet but apparently somebody leaked to the press that they've discovered a new force carrier, so the articles started spinning out of control.

I didn't post this for a few days because I didn't see an article that told us basically -anything- other than "we found something but we're not sure, so standby for 8 months while we decide", until now.

http://www.newscientist.com/article...-at-fermilab-hints-at-technicolour-force.html

And for the wikipedia page on this so-called "Technicolour Force":

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technicolor_(physics)

 

[Asbo Zaprudder]

This is reported to be a 3-sigma "blip", which show up every 10-20 years on average, and might disappear as more data are collected. I believe a 5-sigma significance level is usually required to make people sit up and take real notice. Hopefully, the Tevatron can collect enough data before it gets shut down for good. Of course, this is exactly the sort of result that the LHC should be able to confirm. I'm not familiar with the Technicolor force, other than I believe it doesn't neatly unify the EM, weak, and strong forces at high energy like supersymmetric theories supposedly do.

 

[iguana_tonante]

I'm not familiar with the Technicolor force, other than I believe it doesn't neatly unify the EM, weak, and strong forces at high energy like supersymmetric theories supposedly do.

Which means it's probably the correct one, as humans tend to favour elegant theories but nature seems to have a thing for the most confused and paradoxical ones, which raise more questions than they answer. Which is good because we scientists won't get out of work soon.

 

[sojourner]

"So ..it talks?"

 

[STR]

It would be amusing if the Tevitron's last run made the LHC's main mission obsolete (not that the LHC itself would be obsolete, just the search for the HB).

 

[Asbo Zaprudder]

Plenty more fish in the sea.

 

[FlyingLemons]

Technicolor is quite an old theory which first turned up in a paper 20 years ago. It's basically a rival theory to the Higgs boson, managing to achieve a Higgs-like mass inducing effect for the W and Z bosons but with different types of particle interaction instead.

There are a few problems with the Higgs that it would solve, and it would be quite interesting to explore the consequences of technicolor in various situations, but I'm going to wait before getting excited about this as we've had this kind of thing before, and even though it's seemed quite certain it turns out to be some kind of error. It could happen again, but if not then it would be a very interesting sign of beyond the standard model physics.