Significance In Presence Of Systematics, And The LHCb Observation Of Bs Decays To Pion Pairs
Sunday, October 7, 2012 - 07:50
in Astronomy & Space
In particle physics searches (and elsewhere) the word "significance" is associated with the quantitative measure of how discrepant is one observation with a so-called "null hypothesis". That is, one searches for a new effect in some dataset, and defines what one expects to see in the absence of anything discrepant from theoretical predictions: that is the null hypothesis. A new particle in the data will usually manifest itself as an excess of events, and this will cause the data to deviate from expectations. read more