As beautiful as they get, or even more so. It is hard to express the beauty of the event that the CMS collaboration published today. CMS, which stands for "compact muon solenoid", is one of the two main detectors operating at the CERN Large Hadron Collider (the other is ATLAS). The duo is seeking evidence for the Higgs boson, the only elementary particle predicted by the Standard Model that still awaits to be discovered.

Giorgio Chiarelli is a particle physicist. His research activity has been based largely at the Fermi laboratory near Chicago, US, at the CDF experiment. In 1994-96 he actively participated in the discovery of the top quark and in the first measurements of that particle's properties. Later, after directing the construction of a part of the new CDF detector, he moved its research interests toward the search for the Higgs boson. Currently he is a INFN research director in Pisa, where he leads the CDF-Pisa group. In the most recent years he dealt with problems connected with the communication of science.

The ATLAS collaboration has just released an important study of the sensitivity to a standard model Higgs boson. For the first time precise predictions are made for LHC running at a centre-of-mass energy of 7 TeV (but also 8 and 9 TeV are considered, given the possibility that next year the energy is bumped up a bit), and for most of the sensitive channels together.

The public document is long and detailed, and I have no time to discuss its intricacies with you here, nor do I believe that you would actually want me to. But I do want to discuss one of the most significant figures in the note. It is shown below.

News from the LHC: the integrated proton-proton luminosity at 7 TeV centre-of-mass energy has generously passed the mark of 40 inverse picobarns yesterday. The CMS experiment alone has integrated over 42 inverse picobarns, as shown in the graph below (the blue curve shows the data collected by CMS, the red one the data produced by the LHC).