19 Feb 2007 Update for CDF
SingleT results:
Tommaso Dorigo, on February 19, 2007, posted a
blog entry (along with comments by him and others) entitled
Compatibility of CDF single
top results
saying:
"... The CDF experiment has been looking for single top production
for quite a while now, and the latest results, based on larger
statistics and more refined analysis methods than ever before, have
been puzzling.
Single top production occurs at the Tevatron proton-antiproton
collisions mainly through two electroweak processes, which have a
combined cross section of about 2.9 picobarns - that is to say, they
happen once every 20 billion collisions, or twice per hour at the
highest Tevatron luminosity. The process is quite hard to distinguish
from background processes, and sophisticated analysis techniques have
to be devised to see a signal.
A priori calculations show that the data collected in Run II is by
now enough to show single top production, and indeed our cousins at
the competitor D0 experiment claimed to see a nice signal of single
top production a couple of months ago, but CDF struggled,
hard-pressed to explain why its three analyses (now four) show
conflicting results: while one analysis sees a signal compatible with
expectations, the others see nothing at all, at the point of being
close to ruling out the existence of the process!
The mesmerizing paradox spurred a deep investigation of the
correlation of the four analyses, performed with pseudo-experiments:
you simulate all known processes contributing to your data samples in
large amounts with Monte Carlo generators, and then fish randomly
from the simulated samples respecting the proportions of the various
processes, creating a large number of sets of events ("pseudo-data")
each of which represent the possible outcome of your data selection
process.
Once you have pseudo-data sets, you can forget about their
origin, and concentrate on the search for single top with your four
methods in each of the sets, coming up with four independent
measurements of single top production cross section for each
pseudo-experiment. The sets of results allows you to see how likely
it was to see such a poor compatibility in the four cross section
measurements as the one you saw in the real data.
CDF finds that they have been unlucky, although not overly so: the
probability of the puzzling result in the data is 0.65%. That is
to say, you should expect to get such poor agreement between the
four analyses only twice in three hundred trials.
I am not sure what is the plan now. I suppose we will collect more
data, planning on a measurement with 2 inverse femtobarns, which
should allow to come up with a measurement after
all.
Comments»
1. island - February 19, 2007 Tommaso, could this have any effect
on the recalculated expectation for the Higgs mass, or is this
strictly a CDF related problem?
2. Tony Smith - February 19, 2007 Tommaso said: "… the data
collected in Run II is by now enough to show single top production
… CDF … three analyses (now four) … one analysis sees
a signal … the others see nothing …". In earlier posts,
Tommaso described CDF using a Likelihood Function (LF) method and a
Matrix Element (ME) method, and D0 using a Decision Tree (DT)
method.
- Were those the three methods of analysis first used by
CDF?
- What was the fourth method of analysis used by CDF?
- Which analysis showed the signal?
- Were the methods of analysis that see nothing primarily
looking for a single-T near 175 GeV?
- Was the method of analysis that saw a signal looking over a
wider range of T-quark masses? ...
3. dorigo - February 19, 2007 Hi Island, well, I believe this
indeed is just a statistical fluke. Not a fault of CDF - once you do
many analyses, sometimes you are bound to find inconsistencies of
this kind. If, anyway, one were to doggedly try and associate any
significance to the discrepancy among the analyses, one would be
hard-pressed to fit it in whatever model. Tony has reminded us of his
model a while ago, and indeed, one of the CDF analyses -the one
not using much of a mass information, thus not assuming 172 GeV for
Mt - is more in line with expectations. Your question, though, is
more focused on the Higgs. Well, I believe that if Tony were right -
i.e., a single top of 145 GeV of mass present in the data - then the
indirect Higgs limit would change quite significantly! But the whole
SM would be shaken, so I doubt one could conclude that the
predictions on the Higgs mass would still decrease (as you know,
dMh/dMt>0, dMh/dMw
4. dorigo - February 19, 2007 Hi Tony, wow, you force me to do
quite a bit of homework today! I am still struggling with the KM post
- which I think I will put out tomorrow - and there you go with yet
another question that deserves a full answer. My problem is that I
have not seen the latest blessed results of single top searches in
CDF out yet. I only saw this 0.56% number today. I will have to dig
into our public web pages. Let me do that. In the meantime, what I
can say is that CDF has a matrix element, a global likelihood, and
a one- and two-dimensional Neural Network analysis. The one
finding a signal is the ME one. But I will be more precise later.
Right now I have to go upstairs to put the telescope out - Saturn
observation in order tonight, and the mirror needs some cooling!
...
5. dorigo - February 19, 2007 Ok, the matrix element analysis
indeed is the one which sees a signal, and measures sigma(t) = 2.7
+1.5 -1.3 pb (theory predicts 2.9 pb). The measurement assumes
Mt=175 GeV to estimate the selection efficiency. You already saw the
mass plot in
http://dorigo.wordpress.com/2006/11/20/a-low-mass-top-in-single-top-events/
…[ here is that mass plot along with description
by Tommaso on that blog page: "...
With a single top event, one cannot really run a kinematical
fitter very effectively to extract the most probable top quark
mass. So one usually looks at things such as the mass of
lepton,neutrino, and b-tagged jet, which has a sizable probability
of being the triplet of objects emitted in top decay. If one looks
at the distribution shown below, one does observe an excess of
candidates with respect to non-single-top processes, but indeed
part of the excess clusters at low mass (if the legend does not
read well, orange and red are the contributions from t-channel and
s-channel single top production in the selected sample). ...".
]...
The other analyses are the 1-dim and 2-dim Neural Network
searches, who find a cross section compatible with zero (the first
determines sigma(t)
6. Tony Smit[h] - February 19, 2007 Tommaso said: "…
if Tony were right - i.e., a single top of 145 GeV of mass present in
the data - then the indirect Higgs limit would change quite
significantly! …". I am not sure about that, because in my
modelthe single-T mass state around 145 GeV is mostly coupled to
other quarks (such as the B-quark) and is not the T-quark mass state
that forms the Higgs through T-Tbar condensate while the Higgs is
primarily a T-Tbar condensate of T-quarks in a mass state around 175
GeV. My model is speculative and may be wrong, but it may not be very
non-standard with respect to the conventional standard model
predictions involving the Higgs and the 175 GeV T-quark state of the
T-Tbar condensate that gives the Higgs. ... PS - Happy Saturn
viewing. A nice planet to see on Mardi Gras. ...".
So:
It seems to me that the invariant mass cross-check data
shown above indicate that much of the excess of events over
background is in the bin for 0 to 150 GeV. So, overall, it seems to
me that the ME method does in fact see single-Tquark events, but that
they are mostly seen in events with Tquark mass below 150
GeV.
Further, since no single-T events are seen by the 3 other
methods of analysis (LE and two Neural Nets) which DO substantially
look only for Tquark mass states around 172 GeV,
I feel that the Fermilab results support at least 2 of
the 3 Tquark mass states in my physics model with 3 Tquark mass
states.
...