What the Tevatron Found?

Abstract

The CDF collaboration has reported a 4.1\sigma\ excess in their lepton, missing energy, and dijets channel. This excess, which takes the form of an approximately Gaussian peak centered at a dijet invariant mass of 147 GeV, has provoked a great deal of experimental and theoretical interest. Although the D\O\ collaboration has reported that they do not observe a signal consistent with CDF, there is currently no widely accepted explanation for the discrepancy between these two experiments. A resolution of this issue is of great importance---not least because it may teach us lessons relevant for future searches at the LHC---and it will clearly require additional information. In this paper, we consider the ability of the Tevatron and LHC detectors to observe evidence associated with the CDF excess in a variety of channels. We also discuss the ability of selected kinematic distributions to distinguish between Standard Model explanations of the observed excess and various new physics scenarios.