Last Saturday night Gian Francesco Giudice and I discussed the discovery of the Higgs boson and its aftermath in front of a wide audience gathered in the Aula Magna of Mantova University.

The event was #173 in the wide program of the town's literature festival, a week of seminars, interviews, performances by authors of books, journalists, and intellectuals in a broader sense.

On Friday evening I will be talking in the wonderful Piazza Mantegna, in downtown Mantova (see picture below). It is an event organized by Festivaletteratura (literature festival), where I will be armed with blackboard and chalks, plus a mike, and where I will explain the way a discovery of a new particle comes about.

On Saturday instead I will be at the aula magna of the Mantova University, where in company with Gian Francesco Giudice (a CERN theorist) I will discuss the Higgs boson discovery and the aftermath. That is a more "serious" event and we will be discussing in front of a paying audience. I hear that the event is already sold out, so it will (should) be interesting!

A new ATLAS search for supersymmetric signatures in 2011 LHC data has appeared last week in the arxiv. The result ? No hint of a signal, not even for ready money.

So if you are on a hurry, you can just have a glance at the graph below, which summarizes the measurement in terms of excluded regions of a slice of the complicated parameter space of SUSY theories.

Otherwise, if you want to know a bit more of what this is about, I can provide some detail.

Everybody seems to be talking about this new would-be particle, allegedly observed in diphoton decays in this paper by Kh. Abraamyan et al. at JINR, and consistent with an earlier claim of two physicists (van Beveren and Rupp) who had considered several distributions published by different collaborations.