Expectations are rising for the 2016 run of the Large Hadron Collider. The machine has restarted colliding protons in the cores of ATLAS and CMS, where finally the reality of the tantalizing 750 GeV diphoton bumps seen by the two experiments in their Run 1 and 2015 data *will* be assessed one way or the other.

The flurry of papers discussing possible interpretations of the observed effect, first reported last December during a data jamboree at CERN, has slightly reduced in intensity but is still going rather strong in an absolute sense. Over 300 phenomenological interpretations have been published on the preprint Arxiv (but I wonder how many will end up with a publication on a refereed journal ? Maybe just a handful). 


300 papers... How much time did it take to produce them ? If a typical paper takes one full-time-equivalent-month to be produced, at least, we are talking about 30 man-years. Most of this investment is likely going down the drain when it will be proven that the 750 GeV blip was a fluctuation. But if, on the other hand, we continue to see an accumulation of events containing two photons making that invariant mass, a new spectacularly exciting season will open up for particle physics.

Do you find this exciting ? Well then, I invite you to take part ! CERN has an "open data" program and they have started to put online not just the data, but also the tools to analyze them! Have a look at the CERN Open Data site ! I bet this is a better way to spend your weekends than many others...

On the other hand, if real analysis work is not your bread and butter, then why not taking a look at real events getting collected by ATLAS, in real time ? This is a lot of fun - and with some experience and a little bit of googling around, I am sure you will soon learn to distinguish a dijet event from a W or Z boson signature...




And if even just contemplating event displays looks like too much work, then of course you can read about the physics in blogs. Here, or elsewhere - there are nowadays heaps of good sources. I would, however, recommend that you visit the collaborative effort going on at the newly restyled AMVA4NewPhysics blog. The rather cryptic name is that of a European network of research institutes doing physics with ATLAS and CMS, and statistics centers working on statistical learning. There are half a dozen PhD students who write about their experience and discuss interesting problems, plus some other three dozen researchers who also do so, at a slower pace.