I got email this afternoon from Andrei Derevianko, the leader of the research project badly described by the press release mentioned in the previous post. He sounds a little surprised by the whole thing (though not much more surprised than I am that my griping on the Internet got brought to anybody’s attention), and explains what happened:
The original story (that I have went through with a writer) is posted here: www.unr.edu.
Unfortunately, the release writers have added introductory paragraph and the title without consulting with me (I was travelling giving talk about our result).
Now the story is being pulled out and will be re-released with corrections. Sorry for the confusion.
The story at that link does appear to have the problems fixed, so hooray for that. And, as a special bonus, he also sent some additional comments on the science, which is the important part:
With respect to the hard numbers: our limit on Z’ mass is 1.3 TeV/c^2. This raises the previous upper mass limit from Tevatron collider.
LHC: there is a dedicated hunt for Z’. After all, Z’ is “the second-best motivated” extension to the Standard Model.
The projected discovery reach at the LHC is 2 TeV/c^2 initially; and 5 TeV/c^2 at full luminosity.
Overall, I think it is remarkable that the low-cost atomic precision experiments/theory are capable of constraining new physics at the level competitive to colliders.
This is the “David and Goliath”-ian aspect to the story. More generally, the results from atomic parity violation are both unique and complimentary to colliders.
The price we pay is that it took us almost eight years to design sufficiently accurate computational scheme that can be run on modern computers. Roughly there is a 1,000-fold increase in computational complexity over previous computations.
I hope that clears things up, and puts the focus back on the physics here, which really is wonderful stuff. Many thanks to Andrei for the email, and for getting the story corrected.