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.

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Final Day of SEARCH 2013

Day 3 of the SEARCH workshop (see here for an introduction and overviews of Day 1 and Day 2) opened with my own talk, entitled “On The Frontier: Where New Physics May Be Hiding”. The issue I was addressing is this: Even though dozens of different strategies have been used by the experimenters at ATLAS … Read more

Higgs Results from The First Week of the Moriond Conference

[UPDATE: Tevatron results start a few paragraphs down; LHC results will appear soon] [2nd UPDATE: ATLAS  new results added: the big unexpected news.   As far as I can tell CMS, which got its results out much earlier in the year, didn’t add anything very new in its talk today.] [3rd UPDATE: some figures from … Read more

How Do We KNOW a Proton Is So Complicated? (Data!)

Among the bridges that I hope to build, as I develop this website, is one connecting what we know today about nature with how we know it. After all, you’re reading my depiction of nature, based on how I think nature works.  I can try to assure you that my depiction is the mainstream viewpoint … Read more

The Benefits of 8 TeV Collisions Over 7 TeV.

Yesterday, a commenter asked me a very good question that I realized I hadn’t yet addressed on this site.  Answering it gives us a chance to look at real data from the Large Hadron Collider [LHC], and to see what differences will arise the machine’s energy is increased from 7 TeV to 8. The protons that … Read more

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