HIGGS AND ENGLERT!
Note: this article is being updated in real time as events unfold... Updates are at the bottom. Note in particular the 12.05 update...!
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Just a small post to mention the recent activity in my Greek blog, where with the help of a very kind Greek student we are offering a selection of articles translated in Greek language.
Here are the latest additions:
A few days ago I
posted the results of a poll ran on 50 or so participants to a workshop on the Higgs boson in Madrid.
The poll consisted of six questions on the expectations one had on the possibility of new discoveries by present-day accelerators, as well as on the nature of the underlying theory of fundamental interactions, and on the nature of dark matter.
UPDATE: Just found out that Peter Woit anticipated me on this -
see his blog entry.
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Just five years ago, on the eve of the start of the Large Hadron Collider, most particle physicists - experimentalists and theorists alike - would have been willing to bet their left testicle or ovary on the fact that new physics would very soon be discovered, most likely Supersymmetric particles (if a suitable payoff had been offered in exchange).
I have reported about the studies of resonances in the decays of the B+ meson by CDF, CMS, and LHCb a few times in the recent past. The situation, in a nutshell, was the following until yesterday: CDF found a new particle, the Y(4140), as a resonant (J/ψ φ) intermediate state produced when B+ mesons decay into a J/ψ, a φ, and a positive kaon; CDF also saw some evidence for a further excitation of the same two-body system; CMS confirmed the CDF claims, finding observation-level significance for both states; and LHCb did not confirm either of the two.
Furthermore Belle, a B-factory experiment studying electron-positron collisions, also found no evidence for the Y(4140) state.
The ATLAS Collaboration
published last week the results of a search for dark matter particles produced in association with a W or Z boson by the 8-TeV proton-proton collisions collected during the 2012 run of the Large Hadron Collider. The search uses techniques similar to ones I have described in recent articles here discussing results of the CMS experiments on different new physics signatures, and I thought it would be interesting to review it here.
Letter To A Demanding PhD Supervisor
Letter To A Future AGI
Living At The Polar Circle
