If you work in experimental high-energy physics you soon acquire a particular sensitivity to the economical display of relevant information. Producing figures that convey the most meaning with the minimum effort is sort of an art, and it is a necessary consequence that HEP experimentalists -the smart ones- end up converging on the definition of graphs which are better than all others in this respect.

I have written enough today about the topic of Higgs boson searches at the LHC by discussing the new ATLAS limits (see previous post), but I feel that, before going to bed, I need to point out the new results on the same topic by CMS, the competitor experiment. As you know, I work in CMS and I have to be twice as cautious when I write about the results of my own experiment, because some of my colleagues have uncovered nerves when it comes to blogs. However, the little I'll say here tonight should cause no discomfort to anybody.

Much awaited, the results of searches for the Higgs boson at the Large Hadron Collider have been released by the ATLAS collaboration, and are being shown at the Lepton-Photon conference in Mumbay, India. I will provide here just the main results, with little commentary - I wish to let the cake cool down a bit before discussing the subject in detail, examining the various inputs.

In my latest instantiation of the "Guess the plot" series I offered a clipped part of a graph showing branching fractions of the Higgs boson. One of the readers made a comment which I was proud to read, since it showed that interested readers of this blog with no specialized education in particle physics can get to know quite a lot about the matter. I answered there more extensively than I do on average, and then I thought that the answer could be of some use to others to whom the thread had fallen out of the horizon. So I am recycling it here.

Like it or not, the Tevatron is going to shut down for good next month. This machine has provided us with tremendous new investigation power in the high-energy frontier of particle physics, and has led the research of hadronic collisions for over two decades. But all good things come to an end.