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On Friday I was contacted by our press officer who wanted someone to provide a quote for a press release on the new result my experiment has just announced. Since I knew people who had worked more closely on that analysis, I forwarded her onto them. Maybe I should have provided a quote of my own, and I might be famous :-)
Anyway, if anyone's interested, here are the press release and journal preprint. Of course like all such announcements, this makes it seem like an earth-shattering result. It is an important measurement, but the result on it's own doesn't answer the fundamental mystery of the cosmological matter-antimatter asymmetry.
It will be interesting to see whether the journal will accept the word "observation" in the title, "Observation of Direct CP Violation in B0 -> K+pi- Decays". In many cases they require a "5 sigma" signal to justify that (otherwise you have to use phrases like "evidence for" or even just "search for"), but this 4.2 sigma result is so unambiguous that we hope to be allowed to claim an observation (otherwise the press release might be a little premature).
Our competitors, Belle, recently published a 2.4 sigma result. Although they currently have a little more data than we do, they haven't yet updated to their full dataset, so the precision of the result isn't quite so good. They were also not so lucky, as their central value happens to be a bit lower (though still compatible with ours).
Anyway, if anyone's interested, here are the press release and journal preprint. Of course like all such announcements, this makes it seem like an earth-shattering result. It is an important measurement, but the result on it's own doesn't answer the fundamental mystery of the cosmological matter-antimatter asymmetry.
It will be interesting to see whether the journal will accept the word "observation" in the title, "Observation of Direct CP Violation in B0 -> K+pi- Decays". In many cases they require a "5 sigma" signal to justify that (otherwise you have to use phrases like "evidence for" or even just "search for"), but this 4.2 sigma result is so unambiguous that we hope to be allowed to claim an observation (otherwise the press release might be a little premature).
Our competitors, Belle, recently published a 2.4 sigma result. Although they currently have a little more data than we do, they haven't yet updated to their full dataset, so the precision of the result isn't quite so good. They were also not so lucky, as their central value happens to be a bit lower (though still compatible with ours).
