Greetings from Stony Brook’s Simon’s Center, and the SEARCH 2013 workshop. (I reported on the SEARCH 2012 workshop here, here, here and here.) Over the next three days, a small group (about 50) of theoretical particle physicists and experimentalists from ATLAS and CMS (two of the experiments at the Large Hadron Collider [LHC]) will be discussing the latest results from the LHC, and brainstorming about what else should be done with the existing LHC data and with future data.
The workshop was organized by three theorists, Raman Sundrum, professor at Maryland (who has opened the day with a characteristically brilliant and inspirational talk about the status of the field and the purpose of the workshop), Patrick Meade, professor at Stony Brook, and Michele Papucci, soon-to-be professor at Michigan.
Of course we’ll be discussing the newly discovered Higgs particle — that discussion will occupy most of today — but we’ll be also looking at many other types of particles, forces and other phenomena that nature might be hiding from us, and how we would be able to uncover them if they exist. There’ve been many dozens of searches done at both ATLAS and CMS, but the experimentalists certainly haven’t had time to try everything plausible — and theorists haven’t yet thought of everything they might try. Workshops like this are aimed at making sure no stones are left unturned in the existing huge pile of data from 2011-2012, and also that we’re fully prepared to deal with the new data, from higher-energy proton-proton collisions, that will start pouring in starting in 2015.
