Tevatron Did Not See A New Particle After All, Fermilab Says
Fermilab's Tevatron Reidar Hahn/Fermilab America's grand particle smasher may not go out with a bang after all. A bump in data at the Tevatron, reported earlier this spring, turns out to be a false alarm - not a new particle or a new force of nature. Physicists at Fermilab say they looked at 200 trillion particle collisions and did not see the same bump in data that their colleagues had announced back in April. "In terms of this effect being a real new physics discovery, I think it is close to dead," said Stefan Sӧldner-Rembold, a professor at the University of Manchester in the UK who is a spokesman for the follow-up experiment. As we told you earlier this spring, an analysis of 10,000 proton-antiproton collisions at the Tevatron yielded a strange result a couple hundred times. Post-collision jets of electrons and W bosons did not behave as they should, and...