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Everything here is at or below 3-sigma confidence, and it's not even clear if that's a local search confidence (i.e. when you know the mass to within a small %)
by frob 5y ago
Everything here is at or below 3-sigma confidence, and it's not even clear if that's a local search confidence (i.e. when you know the mass to within a small %) or a global search (where you don't know the mass and are just looking all over the place for an excess which inherently makes it more likely you find SOMETHING which makes your confidence lower). The world of particle physics is littered with the graves of 3-sigma excesses.
At this point, there is basically nothing to see here. You will do yourself a favor by just moving along.
- jessriedel 5y agoMultiple 3-sigma excesses explained by the same model are potentially much more significant from a Bayesian perspective than several unrelated 3-sigma excesses.
- exmadscientist 5y agoThat's very true, but the candidate LEP signal is pretty weak, given that they were explicitly on the hunt for this exact sort of thing. I agree with the parent poster: move along (unless you're directly working on this!), and then get happy news later if something interesting does emerge. Just don't wait up for it.
- jessriedel 5y ago> the candidate LEP signal is pretty weak, given that they were explicitly on the hunt for this exact sort of thing. Isn't the fact that they were explicitly hunting for it a reason to take it more seriously? In contrast, if this signal was discovered after trawling the huge dataset for a hundred possible hypotheses, that would be a reason to discount it, Bayes-wise.