Conversations About Science with Theoretical Physicist Matt Strassler
I’ve tried to write a brief commentary on the news from Grenoble about the search for the Higgs particle, and what happens next.
ATLAS reports that they have excluded Higgs with mass of 158-186 GeV but see an excess of between 2 and 3 standard deviations in the range 130-150 or so. CMS reports exclusion of 150-183 but they see some excess in the same region of 130-150 or so, not quite as large, more like 1-2 standard … Read more
Greetings from Grenoble, and the EuroPhysics conference. There’s so much data being described, and there are so many simultaneous talks, that it is hard to make sure I’m getting all of the new information. And there’s a huge amount of news, which will take a while to summarize. Before I do, I should say that … Read more
No less than Fox News reports that Fermilab has found a new particle! And it’s true, but this is one of those places where the word “particle” is not descriptive. This is a new [but totally expected!] HADRON, a particle made from other known particles — quarks, antiquarks and gluons.
Greetings from Grenoble and the European Physical Society conference! Lots of new data to review! I’ll have more to say on that over the next days. Meanwhile, you might be wondering, as have been many particle physicists, why the Tevatron experiments CDF and DZero are seeing so many deviations from the Standard Model recently. Here’s … Read more
Starting Thursday, the big EuroPhysics conference on particle physics, in Grenoble, France. 400 talks! I am trying to figure out how to attend four simultaneously…
Ok, folks, the web site “Of Particular Significance” is officially open for business. A few articles, posts and video clips are up, and news from the first big LHC summer conference starts flowing in later this week! Take a look around and check back often…
I posted on Friday that the CDF experiment at the Tevatron claims to have observed a long-sought rare process — the decay of a particle called the B_s meson to a muon and anti-muon — and the observed rate is at least 1.5 times and perhaps as much as 6 times what was expected in … Read more