{"id":3019,"date":"2010-06-15T21:03:44","date_gmt":"2010-06-16T01:03:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=3019"},"modified":"2010-06-15T23:09:29","modified_gmt":"2010-06-16T03:09:29","slug":"god-particles-breeding-like-bosons","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=3019","title":{"rendered":"God Particles Breeding Like Bosons"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Science news in the media today is full of stories about Fermilab finding no less than five Higgs particles: <a href=\"http:\/\/www.theregister.co.uk\/2010\/06\/15\/higgs_bosons\/\">God Particles Breeding Like Bosons<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.telegraph.co.uk\/science\/large-hadron-collider\/7829090\/The-God-particle-may-exist-in-five-forms-Large-Hadron-Colliders-rival-project-finds.html\">The &#8216;God Particle&#8217; may exist in five forms, Large Hadron Collider&#8217;s rival project finds<\/a>,  <a href=\"http:\/\/news.bbc.co.uk\/2\/hi\/science_and_environment\/10313875.stm\">US experiment hints at &#8216;multiple God particles&#8217;<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/science.slashdot.org\/story\/10\/06\/15\/2324254\/Fermilab-Experiment-Hints-At-Multiple-Higgs-Particles\">Fermilab Experiment Hints at Multiple Higgs Particles<\/a>.   The source of these stories can be traced back to this <a href=\"http:\/\/arxiv.org\/abs\/1005.4238\">preprint<\/a>, whose authors then appeared on <a href=\"http:\/\/www-hep.phys.cmu.edu\/~paulini\/WRCT\/\">this radio program<\/a>, leading to <a href=\"http:\/\/www.symmetrymagazine.org\/breaking\/2010\/06\/04\/could-dzero-result-point-to-multiple-higgses\/\">this Symmetry Breaking story<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>On May 18 D0 <a href=\"http:\/\/www.fnal.gov\/pub\/presspass\/press_releases\/CP-violation-20100518.html\">claimed<\/a> observation of CP violation in processes involving B-mesons of a sort that could not be explained by the SM, at a significance level of around 3 sigma.  For an explanation, a good place to look is <a href=\"http:\/\/resonaances.blogspot.com\/2010\/05\/new-physics-claim-from-d0.html\">Resonaances<\/a>.   A violation of the SM is an extraordinary claim, so it requires some extraordinary evidence, and a 3-sigma result is not that extraordinary.   The case for such a violation was strengthened by the fact that D0 and CDF had seen a 2-sigma violation of the SM in a similar CP-violating process.   The May 23 theory theory preprint tries to explain these SM violations with a model involving two Higgs doublets.  Two days later though, on May 25, CDF <a href=\"http:\/\/agenda.infn.it\/getFile.py\/access?contribId=12&#038;resId=0&#038;materialId=slides&#038;confId=2635\">reported<\/a> new results: with better data, their 2-sigma SM violation had gone away (now it is 0.8 sigma, completely consistent with the SM).  Again, for a good explanation of this, see <a href=\"http:\/\/resonaances.blogspot.com\/2010\/05\/cdf-says-calm-down-everybody.html\">Resonaances<\/a>.   Somehow, the disappearance of one of the main reasons for taking all this seriously didn&#8217;t make it into the Symmetry Breaking story, or any of the flood of ridiculous stories that appeared today.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Science news in the media today is full of stories about Fermilab finding no less than five Higgs particles: God Particles Breeding Like Bosons, The &#8216;God Particle&#8217; may exist in five forms, Large Hadron Collider&#8217;s rival project finds, US experiment &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=3019\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3019","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-experimental-hep-news","category-this-weeks-hype"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3019","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3019"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3019\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3024,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3019\/revisions\/3024"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3019"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3019"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3019"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}