Off to Illinois’s National Labs For a Week of Presentations

I have two very different presentations to give this week, on two very similar topics. First I’m going to the LHC Physics Center [LPC], located at the Fermilab National Accelerator Laboratory, host of the now-defunct Tevatron accelerator, the predecessor to the Large Hadron Collider [LHC]. The LPC is the local hub for the United States wing of the CMS experiment, one of the two general-purpose experiments at the LHC. [CMS, along with ATLAS, is where the Higgs particle was discovered.] The meeting I’m attending is about supersymmetry, although that’s just its title, really; many of the talks will have implications that go well beyond that specific subject, exploring more generally what we have and still could search for in the LHC’s existing and future data.  I’ll be giving a talk for experts on what we do and don’t know currently about one class of supersymmetry variants, and what we should be perhaps be trying to do next to cover cases that aren’t yet well-explored.

Second, I’ll be going to Argonne National Laboratory, to give a talk for the scientists there, most of whom are not particle physicists, about what we have learned so far about nature from the LHC’s current data, and what the big puzzles and challenges are for the future.  So that will be a talk for non-expert scientists, which requires a completely different approach.

Both presentations are more-or-less new and will require quite a bit of work on my part, so don’t be surprised if posts and replies to comments are a little short on details this week…