Thanks to Sven Heinemeyer and his colleagues, we can give a peek today at the status of the agreement of top and W boson masses with Standard Model predictions for the Higgs boson mass, and with SUSY predictions as well. The figure below is just one of the many versions he has produced.



Maybe I should not say "SUSY predictions", as it is clear, by inspecting the figure above, that the green band is quite wide, a result of the many free parameters whose value have an impact in determining the mass of the lightest Higgs scalar.

The Tevatron collider has been shut down for almost half a year now, but the CDF experiment is still busy producing world-class measurements of fundamental Standard Model parameters.

Actually, the above is not quite correct: CDF is re-defining "world class" in some cases. The measurement I am going to describe, which has just been made public (if you are quick you can follow live the seminar presented by Prof. Ashutosh Kotwal at Fermilab here), totally outperforms all previous determinations of a crucial ingredient of the Standard Model: the W boson mass.

This just in: the controversial Opera result on superluminal neutrinos is affected by a previously unaccounted for experimental error, which completely overturns the conclusions.

This is explained in detail here. Note that the source is James Gillies, head of Communications at CERN, and thus hardly a "unofficial leak". In fact, tomorrow there will be a CERN press release on the matter.

The relevant quote is the following:

About a month ago I held a three-hour course on "Statistics for Data Analysis in High-Energy Physics" in the nice setting of Engelberg, a mountain location just south of Zurich. Putting together the 130 slides of that seminar was a lot of work and not little fun; in the process I was able to collect some "simple" explanatory cases of the application of statistical methods and related issues. A couple of examples of this output is given in a post on the fractional charge of quarks and in an article on the weighted average of correlated results.

A nice new search for heavy quarks has been completed by the ATLAS collaboration in 7 TeV proton-proton collisions data collected in 2011. The ideas behind the search are instructive to describe, so I will spend some time trying to do that before I discuss the results and their meaning.

Quarks: properties and decays

Of the dozens of new physics models which are currently on the market of Standard Model extensions and plug-ins, the ones hypothesizing the existence of additional dimensions of space-time beyond the 3+1 we know about are definitely among the most fascinating.