The high energy physics reader's digest
This is the second part of our coverage of the P5 report and its implications for particle physics. To read the first part, click here One of the thorniest questions in particle physics is ‘What comes after the LHC?’. This was one of the areas people were most uncertain what the P5 report would say. …
Continue reading “What comes after the LHC? – The P5 Report & Future Colliders”
Particle physics is the epitome of ‘big science’. To answer our most fundamental questions out about physics requires world class experiments that push the limits of whats technologically possible. Such incredible sophisticated experiments, like those at the LHC, require big facilities to make them possible, big collaborations to run them, big project planning to make …
Continue reading “The P5 Report & The Future of Particle Physics (Part 1)”
Every year since 1966, particle physicists have gathered in the Alps to unveil and discuss their most important results of the year (and to ski). This year I had the privilege to attend the Moriond QCD session so I thought I would post a recap here. It was a packed agenda spanning 6 days of …
When students first learn quantum field theory, the mathematical language the underpins the behavior of elementary particles, they start with the simplest possible interaction you can write down : a particle with no spin and no charge scattering off another copy of itself. One then eventually moves on to the more complicated interactions that describe …
Continue reading “The Search for Simplicity : The Higgs Boson’s Self Coupling”
Title: “The Piezoaxionic Effect” Authors: Asimina Arvanitaki, Amalia Madden, Ken Van Tilburg Link: https://arxiv.org/abs/2112.11466 We can’t find the missing five-sixths of the universe called dark matter because it doesn’t collide in detectors — but what if it shakes them? Today’s paper theorizes a new kind of stretchy detector that rapidly shrinks and expands in dark …
Continue reading “Stretching the limits of dark matter searches with springy detectors”
Gravity, electromagnetism, strong, and weak — these are the beating hearts of the universe, the four fundamental forces. But do we really need the last one for us to exist? Harnik, Kribs and Perez went about building a world without weak interactions and showed that, indeed, life as we know it could emerge there. This …
Just before the 2022 holiday season LHCb announced it was giving the particle physics community a highly anticipated holiday present : an updated measurement of the lepton flavor universality ratio R(K). Unfortunately when the wrapping paper was removed and the measurement revealed, the entire particle physics community let out a collective groan. It was not …
Continue reading “LHCb’s Xmas Letdown : The R(K) Anomaly Fades Away”
2022 saw the pandemic-delayed Snowmass process confront the past, present, and future of particle physics. As the last papers trickle in for the year, we review Snowmass’s major developments and takeaways for particle theory. It’s February 2022, and I am in an auditorium next to the beach in sunny Santa Barbara, listening to particle theory …
Continue reading “What’s Next for Theoretical Particle Physics?”
Deep underground, on the border between Switzerland and France, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is starting back up again after a 4 year hiatus. Today, July 5th, the LHC had its first full energy collisions since 2018. Whenever the LHC is running is exciting enough on its own, but this new run of data taking …
Continue reading “The LHC is on turning on again! What does that mean?”
This is part two of our coverage of the CDF W mass measurement, discussing how the measurement was done. Read about the implications of this result in our sister post here Last week, the CDF collaboration announced the most precise measurement of the W boson’s mass to date. After nearly ten years of careful analysis, …