Anomaly at the Tevatron Might Be Something Real?

The Tevatron, Fermilab's mighty but ancient (as these things go) particle accelerator, is scheduled to be shut down at the end of this year. But the old beast might have a trick or two left yet. Way back in April we talked about a couple of lingering anomalies in the Tevatron data that had risen to the level where theorists were intrigued enough to start building models. One of these -- a forward/backward asymmetry in top-quark interactions -- had been around for a while, and was taken seriously by a number of people. The other -- a tiny bump near 150 GeV in the total number of events that produce a W boson and two jets -- was relatively new, and was greeted by a bit of scoffing. The bump credibility took another hit when it was pointed out that it could be explained away by a simple (although completely ...