This is just a short post to mention one thing I recently learned from a colleague - the ATLAS experiment also seems to have collected a 5.3 TeV dijet event, as CMS recently did (the way the communication took place indicates that this is a public information; if it is not, might you ATLAS folks let me know, so that I'll remove this short posting?). If any reader here from ATLAS can point me to the event display I would be grateful. These events are spectacular to look at: the CMS 5 TeV dijet event display was posted here a month ago if you like to have a look.
5 TeV and above are still terra incognita for jet-jet resonances: our Run 1 searches have excluded the existence of a number of possible states, predicted by new theory models, in the 3-4 TeV range, but at 5 TeV there is still room for surprises. That is why the occurrence of a couple of dijet events at that mass, in analyzed data samples of the order of 100 inverse picobarns, is something interesting to me.
Of course I do not believe there is anything new there: to me it is just a fluctuation, and not even a very rare one; expected backgrounds predict of the order of a few tenths of an event of that kind. But it feels good to keep looking; it is more or less like sitting at a lottery extraction with a ticket in your hand. Much more exciting than sitting there with no ticket, right? One could imagine betting one dollar that there's a new particle to discover there, at 100000:1 odds. Yes, a one million dollar payoff would be appropriate for such a bet. Finding a resonance at 5.3 TeV would be worth much more for particle physicists nowadays!
