Of Particular Significance

An Overdue Update

POSTED BY Matt Strassler

POSTED BY Matt Strassler

ON 11/20/2015

A number of people have asked why the blog has been quiet. To make a long story short, my two-year Harvard visit came to an end, and my grant proposals were turned down. No other options showed up except for a six-week fellowship at the Galileo Institute (thanks to the Simons Foundation), which ended last month.  So I am now employed outside of science, although I maintain a loose affiliation with Harvard as an “Associate of the Physics Department” (thanks to Professor Matt Schwartz and his theorist colleagues).

Context: U.S. government cuts to theoretical high-energy physics groups have been 25% to 50% in the last couple of years. (Despite news articles suggesting otherwise, billionaires have not made up for the cuts; and most donations have gone to string theory, not particle physics.) Spare resources are almost impossible to find. The situation is much better in certain other countries, but personal considerations keep me in this one.

News from the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) this year, meanwhile, is optimistic though not without worries. The collider itself operated well despite some hiccups, and things look very good for next year, when the increased energy and high collision rate will make the opportunities for discoveries the greatest since 2011. However, success depends upon the CMS experimenters and their CERN lab support fixing some significant technical problems afflicting the CMS detector and causing it to misbehave some fraction of the time. The ATLAS detector is working more or less fine (as is LHCb, as far as I know), but the LHC can’t run at all while any one of the experimental detectors is open for repairs. Let’s hope these problems can be solved quickly and the 2016 run won’t be much delayed.

There’s a lot more to say about other areas of the field (gravitational waves, neutrinos, etc.) but other bloggers will have to tell those tales. I’ll keep the website on-line, and will probably write some posts if something big happens. And meanwhile I am slowly writing a book about particle physics for non-experts. I might post some draft sections on this website as they are written, and I hope you’ll see the book in print sometime in the next few years.

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A decay of a Higgs boson, as reconstructed by the CMS experiment at the LHC

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