The Moriond EWK conference is in full swing and results are being shown of the recent new searches for rare decays of the Bs meson. The Bs is a hadron made up by a bottom quark and a (anti)strange one. The peculiar composition of this particle and its zero electric charge make it a very interesting probe of new physics in its decays: new physics processes might give a sizable contribution to the rate of decays yielding pairs of muons, which are both very rare in the standard model, and very easy to identify in the detector.

Just a few days ago the CDF collaboration announced their new measurement of the W boson mass, with a considerable improvement over the precision of the current world average for that quantity. Now DZERO, the competitor experiment, has also published their own new measurement, which is based on a statistics of 4.3 inverse femtobarns - twice as many data as the ones used by CDF.

As today I have just published a piece on CP violation which lacks detail on the theoretical aspects of the issue, I think it is a good time to offer you here a post on the matter written by Carl Brannen, a independent researcher and now Ph.D. student who is a great example of how what is typically dubbed "crackpottery" can at times convert into accepted science. Carl has managed to get a few of his papers accepted for publication, but he remains "on the edge", dealing with issues that many frown upon. Maybe he is right, or maybe he is not, but I sympathize with his approach, so I occasionally offer him this site for his pieces [TD].

A long awaited confirmation that direct CP violation occurs in Bs mesons (particles composed of a b- and an s-quark) not unlike what happens to lighter mesons (the K0, the B0, and the D0) is coming from LHCb. In an article appeared yesterday in the Cornell arxiv, LHCb describe their measurement of direct CP violation in the decays of both B0 and Bs mesons to Kπ final states (a kaon and a pion). The former is now the best precision measurement we have of the phenomenon, the latter is also the most precise bid (only one former measurement of the effect exists).

Today Greenpeace issued the 52-page report "Lessons from Fukushima". In it the Japanese nuclear catastrophe is analyzed in detail, and its causes and consequences exposed. The report correctly focuses on a few crucial issues: the lack of accountability for the disastrous consequences of nuclear incidents, the lack of a correct approach to the potential risks involved in the production of nuclear energy, and the failure of proper emergency planning.

Thanks to Sven Heinemeyer and his colleagues, we can give a peek today at the status of the agreement of top and W boson masses with Standard Model predictions for the Higgs boson mass, and with SUSY predictions as well. The figure below is just one of the many versions he has produced.



Maybe I should not say "SUSY predictions", as it is clear, by inspecting the figure above, that the green band is quite wide, a result of the many free parameters whose value have an impact in determining the mass of the lightest Higgs scalar.