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Off to CERN

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After a couple of months of hard work on grant writing, career plans and scientific research, I’ve made it back to my blogging keyboard.  I’m on my way to Switzerland for a couple of weeks in Europe, spending much of the time at the CERN laboratory. CERN, of course, is the host of the Large Hadron Collider … Read more

A Real Workshop

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In the field of particle physics, the word “workshop” has a rather broad usage; some workshops are just conferences with a little bit of time for discussion or some other additional feature.  But some workshops are about WORK…. typically morning-til-night work.  This includes the one I just attended at the Perimeter Institute (PI) in Waterloo, Canada, which brought particle experimentalists from the CMS experiment (one of the two general-purpose experiments at the Large Hadron Collider [LHC] — the other being ATLAS) together with some particle theorists like myself.  In fact, it was one of the most productive workshops I’ve ever participated in.

The workshop was organized by the PI’s young theoretical particle physics professors, Philip Schuster and Natalia Toro, along with CMS’s current spokesman Joseph Incandela and physics coordinator Greg Landsberg. (Incandela, professor at the University of California at Santa Barbara, is now famous for giving CMS’s talk July 4th announcing the observation of a Higgs-like particle; ATLAS’s talk was given by Fabiola Gianotti. Landsberg is a senior professor at Brown University.) Other participants included many of the current “conveners” from CMS — typically very experienced and skilled people who’ve been selected to help supervise segments of the research program — and a couple of dozen LHC theorists, mostly under the age of 40, who are experienced in communicating with LHC experimenters about their measurements. 

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Is Supersymmetry Ruled Out Yet?

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[A Heads Up: I’m giving a public lecture about the LHC on Saturday, April 28th, 1 p.m. New York time/10 a.m. Pacific, through the MICA Popular Talks series, held online at the Large Auditorium on StellaNova, Second Life; should you miss it, both audio and slides will be posted for you to look at later.] Is … Read more

Professor Peskin’s Four Slogans: Advice for the 2012 LHC

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On Monday, during the concluding session of the SEARCH Workshop on Large Hadron Collider [LHC] physics (see also here for a second post), and at the start of the panel discussion involving a group of six theorists, Michael Peskin, professor of theoretical particle physics at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center [and my Ph.D. advisor] opened the … Read more

Taking Stock: Where is the Higgs Search Now?

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Today, we got new information at the Moriond conference on the search for the Higgs particle (in particular, Phase 1 of the search, which involves the search for the simplest possible Higgs particle, called the “Standard Model Higgs”) from the Tevatron and the Large Hadron Collider [LHC], the Tevatron’s successor.  With those results in hand, and … Read more

News from La Thuile, with Much More to Come

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At various conferences in the late fall, the Large Hadron Collider [LHC] experiments ATLAS and CMS showed us many measurements that they made using data they took in spring and summer of 2011. But during the fall their data sets increased in size by a factor of two and a half!  So far this year the only … Read more

Why a Lightweight Higgs is a Sensitive Creature — Part 2

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[Note added:  It is official — as expected, at this year’s Chamonix workshop, where the Large Hadron Collider’s [LHC’s] future is planned out each year, it was decided that the LHC’s energy will be increased by 14% next year (from 3.5 TeV energy per proton and 7 TeV energy per collision in 2010-2011 to 4 … Read more

LHC as Juggernaut and Behemoth

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Yesterday I spent the afternoon at the Third Indian-Israeli International Meeting on String Theory,  held at the Israel Institute for Advanced Studies.  The subject of the meeting is “Holography and its Applications”.  No, this isn’t holography as in that optical trick that allows you to create a three-dimensional image on the security strip of your credit card — this is “holography” as string theorists like to discuss it, that trick of describing gravitational or string-theoretic physics  in a certain number of spatial dimensions as quantum field theory (without gravity) in a smaller number of spatial dimensions.  It’s impressive, even stunning, that sometimes you can use a precise form of the holographic principle to solve some difficult string theory problems by rewriting them as easier quantum field theory problems, and solve some difficult quantum field theory problems by rewriting them as easier string theory problems.

I worked in this research area on and off for quite a while (mainly 1999-2007) so I know most of the participants in this subfield.  In fact my most commonly cited paper happens to be on this subject.  But ironically my role at this conference was to present, as the opening talk, a review of 2011 at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).

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