A Week On Topic at Fermilab

The blog’s been quiet recently, thanks to a series of unfortunate events, not the least of which were my first (known) Covid-19 infection and an ongoing struggle with a bureaucracy within the government of Massachusetts. But meanwhile there is some good news: it seems I will someday have a book published. More on that another time.

Meanwhile I have also been doing some science. Recent efforts included presenting at a workshop on the potential capabilities of the Future Circular Collider [FCC], a possible successor to the Large Hadron Collider [LHC]. Honestly, my own feeling is that the FCC is an unfortunate distraction from important LHC activities. For my part I remain focused on the latter, and on trying to remind everyone just how much remains to do with the LHC data sets from previous years.

Visiting the LPC at Fermilab

Toward that end, I’ll be at the Fermilab National Accelerator this week, near Chicago. I’ll be visiting their LHC Physics Center [LPC], which is the major US hub for the CMS experiment at the LHC. (CMS is one of the LHC’s two general purpose experiments, the other being ATLAS; these are the experiments that discovered the Higgs particle.)

Read more

At a Workshop on Hidden Particles at the LHC

Cutting edge particle physics today:

I’ve been spending the week at an inspiring and thought-provoking scientific workshop. (Well, “at” means “via Zoom”, which has been fun since I’m in the US and the workshop is in Zurich; I’ve been up every morning this week before the birds.) The workshop brings together a terrific array of particle theorists and Large Hadron Collider [LHC] experimenters from the ATLAS and CMS experiments, and is aimed at “Semi-Visible Jets”, a phenomenon that could reveal so-far-undiscovered types of particles in a context where they could easily be hiding. [Earlier this week I described why its so easy for new particles to hide from us; the Higgs boson itself hid for almost 25 years.]

After a great set of kick-off talks, including a brand new result on the subject from ATLAS (here’s an earlier one from CMS) we moved into the presentation and discussion stage, and I’ve been learning a lot. The challenges of the subject are truly daunting, not only because the range of possible semi-visible jets is huge, but also because the scientific expertise that has to be gathered in order to design searches for semi-visible jets is exceptionally wide, and often lies at or beyond the cutting edge of research.

Read more

%d bloggers like this: