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.

Perhaps a bit too simple, but certainly appealing. Extensions of the Standard Model which imply the existence of a new U(1) gauge group to complement the SU(2)xU(1) structure of electroweak interactions have been put forth in a number of slightly different versions. All imply the existence of a new Z' boson, a heavier version of the Z0. For those not yet introduced to the latter, the Z0 is the neutral vector boson hypothesized by Glashow, Salam and Weinberg in the sixties to complete a triplet of weak currents and thereby allow the unification of weak and electromagnetic interactions.

Little less than one year ago the world of fundamental physics was shaken by the bold claim of the OPERA collaboration, which produced a measurement of the time of flight of neutrinos traveling underground from Geneva to the Gran Sasso mine in central Italy. The beam of neutrinos, produced by the CERN SpS proton synchrotron, was observed to produce interactions in the large mass of the OPERA detector with about 60 nanosecond anticipation with respect to what would be expected for a particle traveling at exactly the speed of light (2439096.1+-0.3 nanoseconds, since the flight path is of 731221.95+-0.09 meters).