Today I was in the mood of cleaning up some areas of my labyrintic hard drive, after having performed a periodic backup of its contents. I thus came across some pieces of text that had been sitting in a remote folder, waiting to be used for a project now obsolete. I was about to just dump these files in the trash bin, when it occurred to me that this was stuff that had taken me some good time to put together, and maybe there was a better use for it.
HIGGS AND ENGLERT!
Note: this article is being updated in real time as events unfold... Updates are at the bottom. Note in particular the 12.05 update...!
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Just a small post to mention the recent activity in my Greek blog, where with the help of a very kind Greek student we are offering a selection of articles translated in Greek language.
Here are the latest additions:
A few days ago I
posted the results of a poll ran on 50 or so participants to a workshop on the Higgs boson in Madrid.
The poll consisted of six questions on the expectations one had on the possibility of new discoveries by present-day accelerators, as well as on the nature of the underlying theory of fundamental interactions, and on the nature of dark matter.
UPDATE: Just found out that Peter Woit anticipated me on this -
see his blog entry.
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Just five years ago, on the eve of the start of the Large Hadron Collider, most particle physicists - experimentalists and theorists alike - would have been willing to bet their left testicle or ovary on the fact that new physics would very soon be discovered, most likely Supersymmetric particles (if a suitable payoff had been offered in exchange).
I have reported about the studies of resonances in the decays of the B+ meson by CDF, CMS, and LHCb a few times in the recent past. The situation, in a nutshell, was the following until yesterday: CDF found a new particle, the Y(4140), as a resonant (J/ψ φ) intermediate state produced when B+ mesons decay into a J/ψ, a φ, and a positive kaon; CDF also saw some evidence for a further excitation of the same two-body system; CMS confirmed the CDF claims, finding observation-level significance for both states; and LHCb did not confirm either of the two.
Furthermore Belle, a B-factory experiment studying electron-positron collisions, also found no evidence for the Y(4140) state.
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