Yesterday both Tevatron experiments submitted arXiv papers announcing five sigma observations of single top quark production. And here they are in order of submitted time with a copy of their final plot:Each of the papers states that "the measured single to quark signal corresponds to an excess over the predicted background with a significance of over 5.0 standard deviations".
Not that you can tell from either of the plots. But this is what happens when signals can only be seen using complicated multivariate analysis techniques, such as likelihood function, matrix element, neural networks and boosted decision trees. The results can only be understood after advanced statistical analysis.
I hope that if we find new physics in ATLAS, it is much more obvious. Otherwise we are going to have a hard time convincing anybody that we've found something. People will be very sceptical for the next couple of years, and rightly so. Important analyses will have to be checked by an independent group within the collaboration, we wouldn't want to publish a supersymmetry discovery, only to to retract it a few months later due the discovery of an energy mis-calibration.
Speaking of convincing a collaboration to release results. The linked papers are intriguing as they both state that they are "reporting the first observation of single top quark production". It'll be interesting to see which one is published first and which experiment is known for the measurement.
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