The Lepton-Photon 2011 conference in Mumbai is just getting ready to start. Unlike the EuroPhysics conference in Grenoble last month, the number of experimental talks is small — and the talks are short. So it’s all going to go by very fast. We’ll get our full dose of Higgs searches at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and Tevatron this morning (Monday), and searches for other types of novel phenomena (including top quark physics, supersymmetry, extra dimensions, etc.) tomorrow. And then the topics will switch to other types of experiments (neutrinos, dark matter, collisions of heavy ions, and cosmic rays), until Saturday.
Although in principle the amount of data collected at the LHC has roughly doubled between Grenoble and Mumbai — a great achievement — you should not assume that the LHC experimentalists have had sufficient time to analyze it all. In fact many studies presented in Grenoble did not use anywhere near the full amount of data that they had back then — I expect we will see many of those studies updated in Mumbai, but probably only for half the current data. So there will be only a few results, I suspect, that use all the data. Some of the Higgs studies might be among them, so that will be quite interesting. We are likely, if Higgs results with more data are presented, to see more of the heavy-Higgs region excluded by the data than we saw at Grenoble. We are unlikely to see anything clearly pointing toward discovery at this point — the hints will probably shift but remain hints for now. I think we would probably need to double the data again first before things become clear. But that will happen soon enough; by the end of the fall, perhaps?
Stay tuned for more news today….
8/21/11
