Not Even Wrong reports:
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
‘God Particle’ may exist in five forms, Large Hadron Collider’s rival
project finds, US
experiment hints at ‘multiple God particles’, Fermilab
Experiment Hints at Multiple Higgs Particles. The source of these
stories can be traced back to this preprint, whose authors then
appeared on this
radio program, leading to this
Symmetry Breaking story.On May 18 D0 claimed
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 Resonaances.
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 reported
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 Resonaances.
Somehow, the disappearance of one of the main reasons for taking all
this seriously didn’t make it into the Symmetry Breaking story, or any
of the flood of ridiculous stories that appeared today.