Friday wrap-up: first physics, CMS magnet, diboson excess...

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...

Long time no blog -- turns out to be hard to keep up with everything in the midst of travel. So here are some "links without thinks" from the last month...

• As of June 3 the LHC has physics data being taken at 13 TeV! The live blog from the day can be found here [1 of 4], and there are five highlights videos on the CERN YouTube channel. The media hype for this milestone was significantly larger than for the first 13 TeV collisions 21 May. I wonder if this was a calculated decision from CERN... it seems that's what would have been preferred after the 7 TeV restart in 2010 (see Particle Fever e.g. 1:00:20).
  
  ATLAS made public a dijet animation and the below pp collision events with 17 vertices(!) from June 3...
  
  
  
  
  
• There was a rumour a couple of weeks back that the CMS magnet was in trouble. The earliest article I am aware of is this one (dated 8 June), which with the help of Google Translate suggests oil contamination of the liquid helium involved in cooling the 4T superconducting magnet. You can read the immediate response of CMS physicists here. Now CMS has released a statement (14 June), which is partly quoted below.
  
  CMS has been taking collision data since the 13TeV startup of the LHC on 3 June. During this period, the CMS magnet has been kept off due to an issue with the cooling system... The issue with the magnet cooling system was identified in the final preparatory phase leading to collisions in the LHC. While preparing for beam in CMS, a problem was found in the system that feeds liquid helium to the CMS superconducting magnet. The problem was diagnosed to be due to oil, which is used in the initial compression stages, reaching the so-called 'cold-box’ of the cryogenic system. The cold-box is a complex system with several sets of filters protecting three turbines along the path of the helium towards the magnet. In order to clean the oil contamination essentially all components of the cold-box have been extracted and replaced... CMS is confident that, following the LHC technical stop and the beam conditioning run that will start at the end of this week, after the low-intensity and commissioning period, the full magnetic field will be available for the 13 TeV LHC run.

• Certainly a month couldn't go by without another excess to keep people busy! Now it is in an ATLAS search for diboson resonances.
  
  
  
  
  The excess is of ~3σ local significance in WZ, WW and ZZ channels, and 2.5σ global. Jester has a write-up and some thoughts, and notes that there is a small excess at around the same mass scale in similar CMS searches. Along with the CMS WH resonance and right-handed W excesses at around 2 TeV, who knows, maybe there's life out there in the desert yet... and not too far away...
  
  
  
  (image credit John Pritchett)
  
  
  PS: I hear the ATLAS $h\to \mu\tau$ analysis is hopefully out within weeks (context)...

• The OPERA experiment has observed (i.e. at 5σ significance) tau neutrino appearance in a muon neutrino beam.

• A few more papers on standard-astrophysical-explanations for the galactic centre excess.

• The Perimeter Institute Convergence conference June 20-24 is archiving its very interesting talks here.

• The CMB@50 Conference held at Princeton from 10-12 June has been "storified" by Renée Hložek, links at her blog.

• Quantum Bayesianism (QBism) and Fuzzballs at Quanta.

• You can now visit more of CERN on Google Street View.

• In audio/video media:
• New podcast series from CERN: In Particular.
• A morning television spot for Australia's dark matter direct detection project. [6 minutes]
  

  On @sunriseon7 today 8.40am see #SUPL Oz's first #DarkMatter detector down a gold mine! Stream http://t.co/MKOaS3JDI3 pic.twitter.com/rlaOdXv857

  — Alan Duffy (@astroduff) June 6, 2015

• The CERN YouTube channel has been active, with videos on top physics, quark-gluon plasma, antimatter, SUSY, and the unknown...
• An interview with Steven Weinberg, drawing from his new book. [1 hour]
• SixtySymbols: what's left to do at the LHC? [9 minutes]
• Quanta Magazine have a YouTube channel now with some well-produced videos; here's their short on Freeman Dyson. [6 minutes]
• Conversations with an Astrophysicist: Dark Energy. [36 minutes]
• Numberphile: numbers with meaning. [13 minutes]

• In space news and pretty pictures:

• The Philae lander on Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko is awake again, and ready to do science...
  
  
  
  
• ... Pluto and Charon in colour from New Horizons...
  
  
  
  
  (Only a couple of weeks now until closest approach: “Color observations are going to get much, much better, eventually resolving the surfaces of Charon and Pluto at scales of just kilometers.”)

• ... a flyover of Ceres from Dawn...
  

  Sit back, relax & fly over dwarf planet #Ceres. New video made w/ images taken during @NASA_Dawn's 1st mapping orbit https://t.co/Ys0WRVuPW4

  — NASA (@NASA) June 8, 2015

• ... and timelapses of the Earth from the ISS in HD...
  
  

Friday wrap-up: IBL, SABRE...

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...

• ATLAS News had a wrap-up of the 900 GeV collisions performed last week. It was cool to see an event display with the insertable B-layer in action (the fourth and most inner layer of the pixel layers on the right insert):
  
  
  
  
  

• The Stawell Underground Physics Laboratory project here in Australia has received $1.75 mil from the federal government to match the State's contribution from earlier this year. The funding will go a significant way to constructing the clean room to host SABRE, the first southern hemisphere dark matter direct-detection experiment, the advantages of which I've mentioned earlier.

• If the dark matter distribution in M87 is spiked at the centre, then this arXiv preprint claims that thermal relic dark matter is ruled out for an unprecedented $m_{DM}\lesssim 100$ TeV! As well, an apparent excess at high energies can be explained by $\mathcal{O}(1-100)$ TeV dark matter. I wonder if this paper will become another galactic centre excess for hep-ph?

• The result has been on the arXiv for a while, but the CMS+LHCb $B_s (B^0)\to \mu^+\mu^-$ analysis was published in Nature, which I thought was interesting enough to note. As far as I can tell from a quick Inspire search, this is the first paper from the LHC Collaborations published in Nature. Note the 6 months from receipt to publication...

• A few very interesting articles this week:
• Nautilus: the story behind the OPERA superluminal neutrinos.
• Aeon: on the pervasiveness and apparent non-falsifiability of inflation.
• Scientific American: on physicists as philosophers.
• Quanta: ultra-high energy cosmic rays, the Oh-My-God particle, and an EeV+ hotspot in the sky.

• In video/audio media:
• New physics frontiers at the 13 TeV LHC from CERN. [3 minutes]
• A first video spot at Quanta Magazine: In Theory with David Kaplan (of Particle Fever fame) on what happens if you fall into a black hole. [2 minutes]
• And if you'd like to learn more about the man responsible for backing the foundation that supports Quanta Magazine in the first place (and for Chern-Simons forms, and for Renaissance Technologies), you should watch the very interesting interview with James Harris Simons at Numberphile. [19 minutes]
• Stephen Hawking on intelligence. [15 minute talk]
• Excellent video at SmarterEveryday on how the window shutters on the space station work. [8 minutes]

• Finally, updates on space missions: 
• New Horizons can now make out all of Pluto's known moons.
  
  
• The bright spots on Ceres we've been following now appear to be deposits of ice at the bottom of a crater.