I like to think at this blog as a place where both full outsiders and highly knowledgeable insiders coexist and exchange information. I know I often err on the side of producing posts which are unintelligible to most outsiders, but at least you have to acknowledge that I try hard to make my pieces at least accessible in their introductory part. Anyway, this is a preamble to say that today I am happy to be able to post a quite nice analogy for outsiders, one which will hopefully explain why we high-energy experimentalists are equally thrilled at the prospects of finding a Higgs boson, or not finding one!
Do you remember the
dijet mass bump found by CDF in W plus jets events ?
That signal, whose significance exceeded four standard deviations, had everybody around
go crazy for a while.
As a 20-year-long (ok well, 19) member of the CDF collaboration, I am very proud of this wonderful experiments' accomplishments in all areas of high-energy physics, from exotic searches to Higgs searches, from top quark measurements to b-physics measurements, and what not. CDF is a landmark in experimental physics, and the longest-lasting physics experiment ever. But it is not foulproof - nobody is in this wild world of statistical flukes and impossible-to-unearth systematic effects.
While experimentalists gathered in Grenoble present the latest results on High-Energy Physics searches and measurements, phenomenologists like Sven Heinemeyer are working 24/7 to update the picture of the breathing space left for Supersymmetry, in the light of the most recent searches.
You of course do not need to be reminded that Supersymmetry is not a theory but a framework, within which a host of possible manifestations of subnuclear physics are configurable based on the value of 120-or-so free parameters. Because of that, if one wants to discuss in detail what are the most likely versions of SUSY left on the table, and what is the value of the most representative and critical theory parameters, one needs more than paper and pencil.
In the last few days I described in some detail (
here and
here) the six searches for the Standard Model Higgs boson just produced by CMS, the experiment at the CERN Large Hadron Collider to which I proudly belong.
A Great Year For Experiment Design
Living At The Polar Circle
Conferences Good And Bad, In A Profit-Driven Society
USERN: 10 Years Of Non-Profit Action Supporting Science Education And Research
