A Very Brief Comment About Yesterday’s Post

I got a question after yesterday’s post that motivates me to make a comment. My post yesterday said that “the LHC is gradually moving from broad searches to precision tests.” The question I received was “Does this mean that the LHC experiments are giving up on looking for supersymmetry [for now]?” The answer is: “Of … Read more

SEARCH Workshop Panel Discussion on LHC Posted Online

The final panel discussion at the Maryland SEARCH workshop — six theoretical particle physicists talking about the 2011 experimental results from the Large Hadron Collider [LHC] and looking ahead to the 2012 data — has finally been posted online, along with the rest of the presentations at the workshop. I wrote about the workshop, which took place in mid-March, here and here.  In the latter post, I wrote:

The workshop concluded with a panel discussion — the only point during the entire workshop when theorists were formally asked to say something. The panel consisted of Michael Peskin (senior statesman [and my Ph.D. advisor] famous for many reasons, including fundamental work on the implications of highly precise measurements ), Nima Arkani-Hamed (junior statesman, and famous for helping develop several revolutionary new ways of approaching the hierarchy problem),  Riccardo Rattazzi (also famous for conceptual advances in dealing with the hierarchy problem), Gavin Salam (famous for his work advancing the applications of the theory of quarks and gluons, including revolutionary methods for dealing with jets), and myself (famous for talking too much… though come to think of it, that was true of the whole panel, except Gavin.) And Raman Sundrum, one of the organizers (and famous for his collaboration with Lisa Randall in introducing “warped” extra dimensions, and also anomaly-mediated supersymmetry breaking [which was competitive with a paper by Rattazzi and his colleagues]) informally participated too.

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Is Supersymmetry Ruled Out Yet?

[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

News from La Thuile, with Much More to Come

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

LHC as Juggernaut and Behemoth

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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About the NY Times article from 8/02/11

On Tuesday, the New York Times had an article on the Higgs particle search.  Not bad, and does quote relevant people, but just a little bit thin on content.  If you want some actual content, try my article on the hints of the Higgs particle. Also, the article falls into the common mistake of not … Read more

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