As a first act in the new committee, I have decided to publish a small article on the recent issue with the Omega_b discovery. The Omega_b is a particle which has been seen for the first time by the D0 collaboration last year, and then also observed by CDF this year. The controversy with this particle is due to the fact that the two observations are in stark disagreement with each other, to the point that one might well claim they constitute the observation of two distinct new states! I discussed the matter in some detail in this blog, and for that sake I even did some studies with computer-generated experiments to test the claims made by the two experiments.
The article I have put together this week just summarizes my findings, and demonstrates a few things:
1) the significance of the D0 observation is much smaller than their claimed "5.4 standard deviations". The probability of a fluctuation causing the D0 observation by chance is maybe a factor of 70 larger than what they estimate in their paper.
2) the two mass measurements by CDF and D0 can be reconciled by assuming that D0 underestimated their systematic uncertainties by a factor of three or four. Instead, the CDF systematics are totally unable to account for the discrepancy.
The above findings are of scarce scientific value by themselves, but the issue they refer to is not, so I decided they are worth a preprint in the ArXiv, as well as one week of effort. I thus polished the programs by which I extracted my results, ran them again, obtaining more precise results than those I had presented in this blog, and wrote everything down in a 10-pages document.
The paper is almost ready to go. It requires me to include a few additional figures and to fix a few references, but the text is more or less ready. I thus submit to those of you who want to check my English and maybe point out where I made not only typographical errors, but where I put together sentences which are not as clear as I meant them to be. If you send me your corrections and comments before next Wednesday, I will recognize your contribution in the acknowledgements section.
You can download my draft here. Happy reading!
