I am sorry if I have not answered your interesting comments above… I was traveling to the US and now I am still quite busy. Let me just pick from your comments at random.

Tony, my remark on alcohol was totally a joke… However, it is true that as measurement techniques have improved and statistics has enlarged, the possibility to miss a state with a much different mass has not decreased, because the two effects work one against the other. I still do not believe it, though

Andrea, your point is a very good one. Nowadays, most high-precision results on Mtop are obtained with matrix-element techniques. I think your suggestion on the amount of extra radiation affecting the results should be looked into – I believe it has been studied, but fetching the documentation is not trivial.

Cheers,
T.

No. That is the point of the example in my comment from the Varnes PhD thesis. The event had mass around 130 GeV if considered as a 2-jet event (throwing away as background the lowest transverse energy jet of the three jets in the data) but had mass around 170 GeV if considered as a 3-jet event.
As Varnes said in Chapter 8 of his PhD thesis:
“… there are six t-tbar candidate events in the dilepton final states … Three of the events contain three jets, and in these cases the results of the fits using only the leading two jets and using all combinations of three jets are given …”.
Note that in those early days D0 (about which Varnes wrote his PhD thesis) had only a few dilepton events, so it was relatively easy to look in some detail at each event individually,
which is an approach that is not so common with higher luminosities and numbers of events.
My fear is that individual event characteristics, possibly key to understanding New Physics (not only my 3-state T-quark model, but also possibly other New Physics), might be missed by LHC if its data is amalgamated into statistically easy-to-manage analysis,
with such detailed individual event data being overlooked.

The reluctance of LHC management to release all data for analysis by outsiders reinforces my fear. See for example the adverse reaction to the open-data proposal by Tao Han described by JoAnne Hewett on her CV blog at
http://cosmicvariance.com/2006/06/23/should-the-data-be-public/

Tony Smith

PS – There being only 6 dilepton events in Figure 8.1 of Varnes’s PhD thesis, it is reasonable for me to discuss each of them, so (mass is roughly estimated by me looking at the histograms) here they are:

Run 58796 Event 417 ( e mu ) – 2 jets – 160 GeV

Run 90422 Event 26920 ( e mu ) – 2 jets – 170 GeV

Run 88295 Event 30317 ( e e ) – 2 jets – 135 GeV

Run 84676 Event 12814 ( e mu ) – more than 2 jets – 165 GeV
– highest 2 jets – 135 GeV

Run 95653 Event 10822 ( e e ) – more than 2 jets – 180 GeV
– highest 2 jets – 170 GeV

Run 84395 Event 15530 ( mu mu ) – more than 2 jets – 200 GeV
– highest 2 jets – 165 GeV

To me in terms of 3 mass Tquark states
high around 220 or so
medium around 170 or so
low around 130-145 or so
those look like

Run 58796 Event 417 ( e mu ) – direct 2-jet decay of medium

Run 90422 Event 26920 ( e mu ) – direct 2-jet decay of medium

Run 88295 Event 30317 ( e e ) – direct 2-jet decay of low

Run 84676 Event 12814 ( e mu ) – decay of medium to low
then 2-jet decay of low

Run 95653 Event 10822 ( e e ) – direct 2-jet decay of medium
with small background other jet

Run 84395 Event 15530 ( mu mu ) – decay of high to medium
then 2-jet decay of medium

I wish that comparably detailed event data would be available for LHC dilepton events.

And can you please list those measurements making use of the Matrix Element technique?
As far as I know, this has its impact mostly in the dileptonic measurements. And some time ago I noticed that ME analyses tended to give the lowest values (but I don’t know if it is still the case with the newest ones).
Maybe there is some very subtle bias related to the technique? After all, it is the technique with the maximum model dependence.
If, as you mention, there is the possibility that we are measuring two different things, any model dependence will introduce biases in favor of one or the other.

dilepton – 2 jets – 170 GeV
single-lepton – 4 jets – 172 GeV
all-hadronic – 6 jets – 177 GeV

and saying that the straight-line fit gives a CHI2 (2.27/2) indicating that “the effect is a non-starter”, I guess in the sense that everything is within a reasonable statistical range of 172.6 +- 1.4 GeV value of the new CDF+D0 combination. Since only the all-hadronic 177 GeV is very far from 172.6 (compared to 1.4 GeV error bar), and all-hadronic uncertainties are relatively pretty high, I do not disagree with Tommaso’s conclusion from that graph
but
my position is that the T-quark “mass might not be one single value” in that the T-quark (in connection with interactions with the Higgs, which itself may be described as a T-quark condensate) might have 3 states:

low – around 130-145 GeV or so
medium – around 172 GeV, the state so precisely measured by DCF and D0
high – around 220 GeV

The “jet effect” that seems to me to support my 3-state view is based on detailed study of individual events, something that can be buried in the statistical analyses more fashionable nowadays.

For example, consider the 1997 UC Berkeley PhD thesis of Erich Ward Varnes and the D0 event Run 84676, Event 12814 (e mu) in which there were 3 jets instead of the 2 jets that are normally expected in a dilepton event.
Varnes plotted the mass as about 170 GeV if all 3 jets were included,
but also as about 130 GeV if only 2 of the jets were included.

To me, that indicates that a T-quark was produced in the 170-GeV state and quickly (by one jet) decayed to the 130-GeV state which then decayed by conventional 2-jet dileptonic decay.

That event is only one of many that can be similarly explained in terms of the 3-state T-quark model.
Unfortunately (in my opinion) such detailed event data is not routinely made available, as it is not needed for currently fashionable work that is carefully looking at the 172-GeV T-quark state, but ignoring the other two.

I will also note that my initial motivation for the 3-state view came from comparing the early semileptonic histograms by CDF and D0, both of which not only showed a peak at the 172-GeV T-quark state, but also a peak at the 130-145 GeV T-quark state, something the Tommaso described as being of 4-sigma significance.

Tony Smith

PS – I prefer to call it the Truth Quark, since I think that Truth and Beauty are like Charm and Strange, and in the old days my favored terminology was used by a lot of particle physicists, but nowadays the sterile conformity of rigidly enforced consensus has almost completely eradicated the use of Truth and Beauty with respect to Quarks,
which is itself a term that extinguished at least two (probably more meritorious historically) competing terms:

Aces
due to George Zweig. According to the book The Second Creation by Crease and Mann: “… Caltech theorist … George Zweig duplicated the quark model exactly at almost the same time. He called the quarks “aces” … he was at CERN … and … had to publish … in … Physics Letters … the editors would hear none of it … Despite heated argument, Zweig never published his long, careful article on aces … It was all right for someone of Gell-Mann’s stature to advocate the … notion … Zweig … having no reputation to protect him … was denied an appointment at a major university because the head of the department thought that he was a “charlatan”. …”.

Ceng Zi
due to Liu Yao-Yang, who was actually the first (around 1960) to invent what is now known as the quark model. His paper was rejected by a Chinese journal. After the publicity of Gell-Mann’s rediscovery, the editors apologized for rejecting the paper, but nowadays not so many people know the name of the true inventor/discoverer of Ceng Zi (now mostly known by the term quarks).

PPS – Tommaso links the “jet effect” with “alcoholic beverage”, so maybe I should say that my favorite such beverage is Strega (however, mostly after dinner, rather than “at dinner tables”).