A routine check of the hep-ex preprints in the Cornell Arxiv revealed today some interesting papers worth giving a look. At least, they are interesting to me: don't expect me to publicize stuff I do not understand or care about! Also, I should mention that many more interesting papers are daily produced, but one cannot really follow everything...

So here is a short list with minimal commentary, for those of you willing to expand your knowledge with a half hour of paper browsing.

  1. 1110.5502 is titled "aMC@NLO Predictions for Wjj Production at the Tevatron", and authored by R. Frederix, S. Frixione, V. Hirschi, F. Maltoni, R. Pittau and P. Torrielli. If you remember the 4-sigma dijet bump found by CDF in its W+jets data, and kept wondering what is the source of that funny effect, you may want to read this paper, which employs new techniques to verify whether the dijet mass shape alteration observed by CDF may be due to a mismodeling of backgrounds. The bottomline: not an effect of ill-understood NLO corrections, according to the authors. 
  2. 1110.5002 is titled "Testing the Approximations Described in "Asymptotic Formulae for Likelihood-Based Tests of New Physics"", and authored by E.Burns and W.Fischer.  It is an interesting paper because it validates the formulae proposed in the paper it refers to -one recently published by G.Cowan, K.Cranmer, E.Gross, and O.Vitells (all members of the ATLAS Statistics Committee, incidentally). Those formulae considerably ease the task experimenters are often facing when trying to test new signal hypotheses.
  3. 1110.5275 is titled "About Statistical Questions Involved in the Data Analysis of the Opera Experiment" and authored by H.Bergeron. The paper focuses on the timing measurement of neutrinos observed in the Opera detector, focusing in particular in the statistical analysis of the shape of the arrival time distribution. The author investigates the leading and trailing edges of the distribution, re-analyzing it independently. He concludes that statistical constraints prevent one from proving a superluminal speed of neutrinos.
  4. 1110.4781 is titled "Narrowing of the Neutrino Light Curve in the Opera Experiment" and authored by M.van Putten. I do not particularly appreciate this study -too quick and dirty to really provide real insight in the subtleties of the time measurement- but I thought I would mention it here anyway, both because I mentioned another study along the same lines in point (3) above, and because the topic of fast neutrinos is still hot enough that you might be interested in keeping up-to-date with the developments, good and bad that they be. The paper, by the way, claims that the superluminal effect has a significance reduced to 4 standard deviations, once the discussed effects are accounted for.