Possible Discovery of Supersymmetric Particles or Premature Hype?

Okay, so this one may get a little hairy. Over the weekend, I caught whiff of this story in some back-and-forth between Woit's Not Even Wrong blog and Motl's Reference Frame blog, but wanted to stay out of it until the dust settled a bit and I had time to absorb exactly what was going on from some less biased sources.

Basically, the CDF group at Fermilab published a 70-page paper that presented findings about "ghost" data which does not look like it can be explained as part of the Standard Model of particle physics. What could these be? Well, in 70 pages, the CDF group specifically avoids explaining it.

The specific finding was a large number of b muons and their antiparticles, bbar muons, coming out of the collisions. As Peter Woit points out, a number of explanations have already been thrown forth from third parties and though Woit seems to discount them, an in fact seems to imply something nefarious about their sudden appearance, they are interesting, if complex, explanations to the findings.

Basically, the controversy comes over the conjecture that these results may come from the creation of superpartners of known elementary particles, called sparticles. Superpartners are predicted by supersymmetry (SUSY) theories such as string theory. Essentially, supersymmetry posits that for every known fermion and boson, there exist related particles that differ only in a half-integer spin - a photon (a boson with spin of 1) relates to a photino (a fermion with a spin of 1/2, but identical in every other way to a photon). Supersymmetry is useful because plugging all these new particles into the Standard Model (or other) equations means a bunch of terms cancel out and, therefore, previously intractable problems become manageable.

Some of the papers appear to link this CDF finding with anomalies reported from other detectors, such as the balloon-based ATIC and the PAMELA satellite, and explain all of them in terms of potential SUSY particles.

Many members of the CDF team chose to avoid cosigning the original paper, which implies there might be some division among the team as to whether the results were ready to be sent in for preprint in their current form. It looks like the eyes of the theoretical physics community are now firmly focused on Fermilab, awaiting a more detailed analysis and explanation.

Related Articles & Blogs:

• The Reference Frame - CDF sees dark unified SUSY in lepton jets?
• Resonaances: CERN particle theory blog - On CDF Anomaly
• Not Even Wrong - Discovery of a New Particle?
• Not Even Wrong - The Circus Begins
• Physicsworld.com - Fermilab 'ghosts' hint at new particles
• New Scientist - Has new physics been found at the ageing Tevatron?
• PhysOrg.com - Fermilab's CDF Result Sparks Rumors of New Physics
• arXiv.org/hep-ex - Study of multi-muon events produced in p-pbar collisions at sqrt(s)=1.96 TeV by CDF collaboration
• arXiv.org/hep-ph - LHC Signals for a SuperUnified Theory of Dark Matter by Nima Arkani-Hamed, Neal Weiner
• arXiv.org/hep-ph - A Theory of Dark Matter by Nima Arkani-Hamed, Douglas P. Finkbeiner, Tracy R. Slatyer, Neal Weiner
• arXiv.org/astro-ph - The PAMELA Poistron Excess from Annihilations into a Light Boson by Ilias Cholis, Douglas P. Finkbeiner, Lisa Goodenough, & Neal Weiner
• What is String Theory?