ParticleBites

While searching for new Higgs bosons the CMS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) may have just found a surprise. They have observed an excess of events that look to be a new particle, and are reporting high statistical evidence for their claim. The only question is what exactly is this new particle? The search was initially designed to look for new, heavier, versions of the Higgs boson …

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. Globally, the field is trying to decide what to do once the LHC winds down in ~2040 While the LHC …

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 dreams of new facilities a r…

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 talks, and featured a lot of great results over many different areas of particle physics, so I’ll have to s…

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 the behavior of fundamental particles of the …

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 matter’s presence, creating…

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 was a counter-proof by example to a famous anthropic argument by Agrawal, Barr,…

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 shiny new-physics-toy we had all hoped…

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 experts discuss their specialty. Each talk begins with r…

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 will also feature several upgrades to the LHC itself as well as the several different exp…

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, … Continue reading "A Massive W for CDF"

This is part one of our coverage of the CDF W mass result covering its implications. Read about the details of the measurement in a sister post here! Last week the physics world was abuzz with the latest results from an experiment that stopped running a decade ago. Some were heralding this as the beginning … Continue reading "Too Massive? New measurement of the W boson’s mass sparks intrigue"

Recontres de Moriond is probably the biggest ski-vacation  conference of the year in particle physics, and is one of the places big particle physics experiments often unveil their new results. For the last few years the buzz in particle physics has been surrounding ‘indirect’ probes of new physics, specifically the latest measurement of the muons … Continue reading "Moriond 2022 : Return of the E…

Title : “Suggestive evidence for Coherent Elastic Neutrino-Nucleus Scattering from reactor antineutrinos” Authors : J. Colaresi et al. Link : https://arxiv.org/abs/2202.09672 Neutrinos are the ghosts of particle physics, passing right through matter as if it isn’t there. Their head-on collisions with atoms are so rare that it takes a many-ton detector to see them. Far … Continue reading "A hint o…

Based on the paper Penrose process for a charged black hole in a uniform magnetic field It has been over half a century since Roger Penrose first theorized that spinning black holes could be used as energy powerhouses by masterfully exploiting the principles of special and general relativity [1, 2]. Although we might not be … Continue reading "Exciting headways into mining black holes for energy!"

Title : “First evidence for off-shell production of the Higgs boson and measurement of its width” Authors : The CMS Collaboration Link : https://arxiv.org/abs/2202.06923 CMS Analysis Summary : https://cds.cern.ch/record/2784590?ln=en If you’ve met a particle physicist in the past decade, they’ve almost certainly told you about the Higgs boson. Since its discovery in 2012, physicists have … Contin…

References:  https://arxiv.org/abs/1712.07158 (CMS)  and https://arxiv.org/abs/1907.05120 (ATLAS) If you are looking for love at the Large Hadron Collider this Valentines Day, you won’t find a better eligible bachelor than the b-quark. The b-quark (also called the ‘beauty’ quark if you are feeling romantic, the ‘bottom’ quark if you are feeling crass, or a ‘beautiful bottom quark’ … Continue read…

Based on the paper The black hole information puzzle and the quantum de Finetti theorem Black holes are some of the most fascinating objects in the universe. They are extreme deformations of space and time, formed from the collapse of massive stars, with a gravitational pull so strong that nothing, not even light, can escape … Continue reading "Towards resolving the black hole information paradox…

Title: “Search for an Excess of Electron Neutrino Interactions in MicroBooNE Using Multiple Final State Topologies” Authors: MicroBooNE Collaboration References: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2110.14054.pdf This is the second post in a series on the latest MicroBooNE results, covering the theory side. Click here to read about the experimental side.  Few stories in physics are as convoluted as the … Conti…

Title: “Search for an Excess of Electron Neutrino Interactions in MicroBooNE Using Multiple Final State Topologies” Authors: The MiniBoone Collaboration Reference: https://arxiv.org/abs/2110.14054 This is the first post in a series on the latest MicroBooNE results, covering the experimental side. Click here to read about the theory side.  The new results from the MicroBoone experiment received … …