I think you know me well enough to not be surprised if I am skeptical about three-bumped stuff. However, I keep it an open-ended issue until the LHC nails it. And I would be disrespectfully happy if you turned out to be even half right.

As for the statistical information in plots, however, I usually get even more skeptical, since I know how to run pseudoexperiments, and when you do it long enough you get to understand a simple fact: just about any background-subtracted plot will show structures such as those at which you hint above.

You of course realize that yourself when you say “such things are very highly uncertain”… Yes. The CDF Z->bb plot will have four times more statistics than the D0 one, and some structure above 100 GeV will still be present (I cannot tell you exactly what or where for fear of being kicked out by CDF), but they will fail to demonstrate anything… We really need LHC data here.

Cheers,
T.

Further, the shift up by 11 GeV also would shift a much smaller (just one data point a bit above the base line, but it and its neighbors do look like a peak) bump in the D0 chart around 170 GeV up to around 181 GeV, which is in the range where my model expects to see a second Higgs peak (the model having 3 peaks for both the Higgs and the Tquark).

Such things are very highly uncertain, but they give me (probably unwarranted, but it feels good anyway) optimism while waiting for LHC results.

Tony Smith
http://www.valdostamuseum.org/hamsmith/

if you look at D0’s plot, the Z peaks at 80, not 91 GeV.
That means that b-jets were not corrected for the many effects that make them different from generic jets (on which jet energy corrections are tuned, since those are the jets you get when you trigger on them at a hadron collider).
b-jets are indeed different: they have a harder fragmentation function, have a larger mass, but most of all they have a 23% branching ratio into leptons – so neutrinos are produced, and they do not leave a signal. Also, 13% of b-jets have muons inside, from b->mu or b->c->mu or b->tau->mu decay chains. And muons, too, give a minimum-ionizing response in the calorimeter.

All that to say that if the Z peaks at 80 instead than 91, then a bump at 140 means a particle at 160 GeV.

Cheers,
T.

PS I still haven’t answered your other recent comment… I am working on it !

Although the statistics are very inconclusive to say the least,
it seems to me that Lubos’s remark is correct.
I am not disinterested, because my model (non-supersymmetric) has a Higgs at about 146 GeV.

Also, it seems to me that the D0 chart, with respect to CDF claim of a bump at 160 GeV, does show, as Tommaso says, that :
“… D0 sees a deficit of events where CDF sees an excess …”.

Tony Smith
http://www.valdostamuseum.org/hamsmith/