Conversations About Science with Theoretical Physicist Matt Strassler
This week I’m at Stanford University, where I went to graduate school, attending a conference celebrating the illustrious careers of two great physicists, Renata Kallosh and Steve Shenker. Kallosh is one of the world’s experts on black holes, supersymmetry, cosmic inflation (that period, still conjectural but gaining acceptance, during which the universe is suspected to have expanded … Read more
This week I’m in California, at a conference celebrating two famous professors, from whom I learned an enormous amount when I was a graduate student and postdoctoral researcher. More on this later in the week.
Today, I just want to let you know I have completed the core of my naturalness article, which I began writing a couple of weeks ago.
Today (as I sit in a waiting room for jury service) I’ll draw your attention to something that has been quite rare at the Large Hadron Collider [LHC]: a notable discrepancy between prediction and data. (Too rare, in fact — when you make so many measurements, some of them should be discrepant; the one place we saw plenty of examples was in the search for and initial study of the Higgs particle.) It’s not big enough to declare as a definite challenge to the Standard Model (the equations we use to describe the known particles and forces), but it’s one we’ll need to be watching… and you can bet there will be dozens of papers trying to suggest possibilities for what this discrepancy, if it is real, might be due to.
The discrepancy has arisen in the search at the CMS experiment for “multileptons”: for proton-proton collisions in which at least three charged leptons — electrons, muons and (to a degree) taus — were produced. Such events are a good place to look for new phenomena: very rare in the Standard Model, but in the context of some speculative ideas (including the possibility of additional types of Higgs particles, or of superpartner particles from supersymmetry, or new light neutral particles that decay sometimes to lepton/anti-lepton pairs, etc.) they can be produced in the decays of some unknown type of particle.
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
Day 2 of the SEARCH workshop will get a shorter description than it deserves, because I’ve had to spend time finishing my own talk for this morning. But there were a lot of nice talks, so let me at least tell you what they were about. Both ATLAS and CMS presented their latest results on … Read more
The first day of the SEARCH workshop was focused on current and future measurements of the new Higgs particle discovered in 2012. A lot of the issues I’ve written about before (for instance here and here) and most of the updates were rather technical, so I won’t cover them today. But I thought it useful … Read more
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 … Read more
Did you know that another name for Minneapolis, Minnesota is “Snowmass”? Just ask a large number of my colleagues, who are in the midst of a once-every-few-years exercise aimed at figuring out what should be the direction of the U.S. particle physics program. I quote:
They are doing so in perhaps the worst of times, when political attacks on science are growing, government cuts to science research are severe, budgets to fund the research programs of particle physicists like me have been chopped by jaw-dropping amounts (think 25% or worse, from last year’s budget to this year’s — you can thank the sequester).. and all this at a moment when the data from the Large Hadron Collider and other experiments are not yet able to point us in an obvious direction for our future research program. Intelligent particle physicists disagree on what to do next, there’s no easy way to come to consensus, and in any case Congress is likely to ignore anything we suggest. But at least I hear Minneapolis is lovely in July and August! This is the first Snowmass workshop that I have missed in a very long time, especially embarrassing since my Ph.D. thesis advisor is one of the conveners. What can I say? I wish my colleagues well…!
Meanwhile, I’d like to comment briefly on a few particle physics stories that you’ve perhaps seen in the press over recent days. I’ll cover one of them today — a measurement of a rare process which has now been officially “discovered”, though evidence for it was quite strong already last fall — and address a couple of others later in the week. After that I’ll tell you about a couple of other stories that haven’t made the popular press…