A Quantum Diaries Survivor

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...!---

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.---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.

The ATLAS Collaboration published last week the results of a search for dark matter particles produced in association with a W or Z boson by the 8-TeV proton-proton collisions collected during the 2012 run of the Large Hadron Collider. The search uses techniques similar to ones I have described in recent articles here discussing results of the CMS experiments on different new physics signatures, and I thought it would be interesting to review it here.

Three weeks ago I gave a plenary talk at the 2nd International Conference on New Frontiers in Physics, which was held in Kolymbari, in the greek island of Crete. The talk focused on some of the most interesting new results by the CMS Collaboration, but being just 30' long it only contained a summary of these. The purpose of the talk was primarily that of advertising the many talks on specific physics topics -Top, Higgs, Exotica, QCD- which were given by some of my colleagues in the parallel sessions; however I was able to show and discuss some nice new measurements myself.

Last week I met Marek Karliner at the ICNFP 2013 conference in Crete, where we both enjoyed a nice friendly atmosphere, great food, and a wonderful peaceful location. Professor Marek Karliner is the chair of the Institute of Theoretical Physics of Tel Aviv in Israel. Since he agrees that outreach in physics is an important service that researchers should provide to the community, I was able to convince him to write for this blog the short article which you find below, on the interesting topic of baryons containing two heavy quarks - TD.

One year has passed since the joint discovery, by the CMS and ATLAS experiments at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, of a particle which perfectly fits our expectations for a Standard Model Higgs boson. Highly wanted and sought for at particle colliders since the seventies, the Higgs boson is now an established reality, and the interest of experimental physicists has moved to a detailed study of the observable properties of this particle.

One year has passed since the joint discovery, by the CMS and ATLAS experiments at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, of a particle which perfectly fits our expectations for a Standard Model Higgs boson. Highly wanted and sought for at particle colliders since the seventies, the Higgs boson is now an established reality, and the interest of experimental physicists has moved to a detailed study of the observable properties of this particle.

Yesterday I had the great pleasure to listen to George Zweig, who gave seminar about the discovery of the idea of quarks (or Aces, as he originally named them) at the International Conference of New Frontiers in Physics which is going on this week in the nice setting of Kolymbari, on the north-west coast of the Mediterranean island of Crete.

Thanks to a friend and follower of this blog, which I will not name for once to protect him from your flaming, I can share today with you one of the best instances of involuntary humor in particle physics graphs I have ever seen in my whole life. The graph appears to be genuine, so this is a good candidate for the IgNobel prize IMHO.