Extraordinary Claims: the 0.000029% Solution, or Anomalies in Collider Data

by Tommaso Dorigo (INFN / Univ. Padova)

Tuesday 13 Dec 2016, 16:45 → 17:45 Europe/Berlin

buildg. 1b, sem. room 4a+b (DESY Hamburg)

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. 48 years after its first invocation and 22 years after its first dutiful application, the five-sigma criterion used in HEP and astro-HEP does not appear adequate to cover all experimental situations. The seminar will start with a short history of the five-sigma criterion, will then focus on a few anomalies found in HEP data and on their resolution, and then discuss the statistical problem of defining a proper discovery level for new phenomena and on the non-trivial issues it entails.

Poster Physikseminar_Dorigo_13Dezember2016.pdf

Slides Dorigo_slides.pdf