A casual look at the Arxiv hep-ph listings this morning was enough to confirm that the feeding frenzy of theoreticians around the latest bait thrown in the waters by CDF is not showing any sign of slowing down.

The paper in question is 1104.2893, and it discusses "Weak-triplet, color-octet scalars and the CDF dijet excess". In their model, the authors (B. Dobrescu and G. Krnjaic) argue in favour of an extension of the standard model which includes rthree new coloured particles, two charged and one neutral state.

The way by which these could explain the CDF bump is however a bit complicated. They can decay to dijet pairs or to a W boson plus a b-bbar pair, so in order to show that they contribute to a W+jj final state they have to assume that the two b-jets produced with the W are not energetic enough to be detected. Then one may think at the Wjj final state as the pair production of two new such particles, with one decaying into W(bb) and the other to two jets.

They show cross section predictions for the Tevatron and the LHC, and they even show a figure where the CDF excess can be somehow fit with a mass distribution from the jj-decaying state, as shown below.

I am not too impressed by this particular attempt at explaining the anomaly. Besides finding it rather difficult to accept that CDF would not have realized the presence of additional b-jets (as soft as they can be) in the events contributing to the excess, I find it even more unbelievable that a final state with a W and two b-jets plus two additional jets does not contribute appreciably to single-lepton top pair decays... Anyway, you can read the paper and make your own opinion on it. Happy weekend reading.