Wherein I list some (mostly) recent happenings, ramble a bit, and provide links, in an order roughly determined by importance and relevance to particle physics. Views are my own. Content very definitely skewed by my own leanings and by papers getting coverage, and it may not even be correct. It is a blog after all...
- Conferences of interest this week include The 3rd Annual Large Hadron Collider Physics Conference (LHCP2015; indico; twitter), and QCD@LHC 2015 (indico).
- At LHCP, Marco Pieri presented the brand new ATLAS+CMS Higgs combination (talk here [pdf]). Slides 17 and 18 tell the story for the SM Higgs versus the null:
The interesting things for me are: global signal strength fit is $\mu=1.09^{+0.11}_{-0.10}$, H→ττ and VBF production are (preliminarily) "discovered" at >5σ, and ttH has a mild (2.3σ) excess (already hinted at Moriond) to keep an eye on. Different parameterisations are also studied, finding, of course, everything consistent with a SM Higgs. Would imagine we can look forward to the arXiv paper soon.
- The Times Higher Education World University Rankings have decided to exclude from their analysis all papers with more than 1000 authors for the 2015-16 rankings. This obviously has a big impact on those involved in the ATLAS/CMS collaborations. Interesting to read the comments below the post from John Ellis, James Stirling, and Andrew Hamilton, among others.
- According to this nature news article, there are some concerns for the cooling pumps in the AMS-02 experiment. There were originally four cooling pumps. They write: "Only one pump is needed at any given time. One failed in February 2014 and at least one of the other three is showing possible signs of trouble." Also: "[Ting] exhibited little patience for questions about the cooling pumps. 'We have four pumps — we only need one,' he says. 'We expect to operate for the lifetime of the space station.'"
- Some movement on the Hawking/Perry/Strominger proposal for the black hole information loss problem. There's now a short stake-claiming arXiv paper, and an hour-long talk from Malcolm Perry on YouTube. Sabine Hossenfelder reacts here.
- From CERN: a summary on LHC Run 2 so far from Rolf Heuer (he comments on the CMS magnet: "... it’s clear that there are contaminants in the cold box that supplies the magnet with liquid helium, and this will therefore need a thorough clean.... All being well, CMS will be able to take data satisfactorily with field on until the end of the 2015 physics programme, postponing the cleaning operation until the winter stop in order to be ready for the start of 2016."), and a summary on recent scrubbing runs.
- Lastly, here is an antineutrino global map: an experimentally informed model of Earth’s surface antineutrino flux over the 0 to 11 MeV energy spectrum.
The interesting things for me are: global signal strength fit is $\mu=1.09^{+0.11}_{-0.10}$, H→ττ and VBF production are (preliminarily) "discovered" at >5σ, and ttH has a mild (2.3σ) excess (already hinted at Moriond) to keep an eye on. Different parameterisations are also studied, finding, of course, everything consistent with a SM Higgs. Would imagine we can look forward to the arXiv paper soon.
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