Things feel like they're starting to wrap up for the year down here, but the holiday season might not be so laid back for us theorists...
- ATLAS and CMS are giving a joint presentation on 15th December: "ATLAS and CMS physics results from Run 2". The discipline is abuzz-with-rumours-circling online and in particle physics offices around the world suggesting there will be something very interesting presented indeed. The suggestion is a ~750 GeV diphoton excess at >3σ, seen by both ATLAS and CMS. If true, it seems very hard to accommodate with the absence of such a bump in Run 1, which makes it all the more interesting...
I was going to make some speculations here, but let us just wait until next week... I'm sure by then there'll even be a bunch of papers on the arXiv which already have the answer.
We've seen anomalies come (and some go) during Run 1 (Higgs diphoton,
Higgs LFV, CMS kinematic edge,
on-Z,
diboson,
B to Kμμ,
WH, etc.), but the buzz around this one seems different somehow. Perhaps because it is such a clean channel, because it is hard to explain on its own, because it is in a quite unexpected place for a first signature of genuinely new physics, and because it has shown up so damn early in the new high energy data. There seems to be a strong hope that this is only part of the story, and we're excited to wake up to a reality which might be rich and complex and full of new puzzles, when, in all honesty, many were expecting a desert (I know I was). Maybe this is just the tip of the TeV-scale.
Certainly the presentation is one to watch. To be continued...
- First new physics searches from Run 2 have hit the arXiv: dijet searches from ATLAS and CMS.
- There was a workshop this week called, "Why Trust a Theory? Reconsidering Scientific Methodology in Light of Modern Physics." The workshop aims to tackle questions such as: "Can a high degree of trust in an empirically unconfirmed or inconclusively confirmed theory be scientifically justified? Does the extent to which empirically unconfirmed theories are trusted today constitute a substantial change of the character of scientific reasoning? Might some important theories of contemporary fundamental physics be empirically untestable in principle?"
Sounds very interesting, and has speakers such as Gross, Dawid, Kane, Silk, Polchinski, Dvali, et al. Some notes were also taken at this blog. Unfortunately I have not had time yet to peruse the talks, but hope to get some time this week.
- Some evidence against the 3.5 keV line appeared on the arXiv.
- Sean Carroll has finished preparation of a new book, "The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself." He published the Contents on his blog.
- Links without thinks:
- Quanta: "Math Quartet Joins Forces on Unified Theory."
- Paul Davies via Guardian: "100 years on, is this Einstein’s greatest gift to human understanding?"
- Nature: "How to build a better PhD."
- Guardian: "Chris Hadfield meets Randall Munroe: Are we alone in the universe?"
- Quantum Frontiers: "BTZ Black Holes."
- Information Processing: "The cult of genius?"
