Hi DA,

The term used in the article that you mention above is "submitted." If a free top quark had been found, it would be big news - not a PRL!

To be fair about this I should mention that these people, and there are a lot of them and they are all named as author/contributors, are spending lots of time developing methods to "sort the wheat from the chaff." They are have put considerable energy into the means of studying and analysing these collision events. That by itself is a worthy effort and will almost certainly produce something good.


Dr. R.