Two New Experimental Results

Today brings news of two new experimental results, both consistent with the Standard Model:

  • At the Higgs Hunting 2012 conference starting today, ATLAS reports results from the WW decay channel for the Higgs. At the July 4 joint announcement, CMS had reported results in this channel, but not ATLAS. Analyses of last year’s data had indicated fewer excess events in this channel than expected from a 125 GeV SM Higgs (see here). The 2012 data from CMS and ATLAS now show an excess in this channel of a size quite compatible with an SM Higgs. For more about this, and a nice summary of the latest combined data for various Higgs channels, see viXra log. The gamma-gamma channel Higgs signal is high, the tau-tau channel is low, others close to expected, but deviations from the SM predictions are not especially significant.
  • At DarkAttack2012, Columbia’s Elena Aprile gave a talk this morning presenting new results from Xenon100. These show no evidence for a dark matter detection and provide the strongest exclusions yet of conjectural high mass WIMPs such as SUSY is supposed to provide. The Xenon100 results now rule out most of the region where pre-LHC CMSSM SUSY model fits showed a dark matter WIMP was supposed to be (see for instance slide 31 here).

Update: There’s a press release about the Xenon100 result here.

Update: At Higgs Hunting 2012, two excellent summaries today of the theory implications of the Higgs results, from Matt Strassler and Michael Peskin.

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11 Responses to Two New Experimental Results

  1. anonymous says:

    For those interested, DarkAttack2012 will be presenting some of the indirect search results (like Fermi LAT) tomorrow as well. Stay tuned.

  2. Yatima says:

    Probably the most aesthetic PowerPoint presentation I have seen:

    http://www.itp.uzh.ch/events/darkattack/talks/Evans.pdf

    Comic Sans users take note!

  3. Artie says:

    Yatima: really? We must have very different taste. I find Slide 20 particularly vile…

  4. David Nataf says:

    Slide 20 has some information on it that is likely to be incorrect (it implies Monoceros is a stream) but other than that how is it vile?

    Though personally I don’t think the PP has great style. I think it’s bad style to have 100 words per power point slide. I was taught to focus on figures.

    David

  5. Anonyrat says:

    I find the font very pleasing, but am unable to find out what the name of the font is, lacking Adobe Acrobat Professional. Using this website, http://www.identifont.com/ , with “Fonts by Appearance” did not help. If anyone knows the name of the font, would appreciate it.

  6. anon says:

    It’s not powerpoint, it’s a keynote presentation, to be precise it’s done using the “Showroom” template. The font is Gill Sans.

    The pure text slides could use some highlights… overall I would say it’s on the better side of presentations, but nothing extraordinary

  7. Artie says:

    David Nataf: “vile” was an exaggeration for comic effect. My objection to Slide 20 is the crudeness (and seemingly random colouring) of the annotations on the figure.

    By contrast, I don’t find the slides too text-heavy at all. (If you want to see overloaded slides, look at any presentation by a mathematician…)

  8. Peter Woit says:

    slides about indirect searches now up at

    http://www.itp.uzh.ch/events/darkattack/programme.html

    which can be examined by experts for new physics or for excellent fonts.

    I’m no expert, but about the 130 GeV gamma line supposedly in the Fermi LAT data, see claims of such a line discussed here

    http://www.itp.uzh.ch/events/darkattack/talks/Hektor.pdf

    and the Fermi LAT presentation is here

    http://www.itp.uzh.ch/events/darkattack/talks/Murgia.pdf

    which just says
    “Comprehensive Fermi LAT team analysis on line searches based on 4 years of data (Pass 7) ongoing”

  9. Dan says:

    Looking at the presentations Peter links to, I think we have a new winner in the aesthetics stakes, the title slide in particular is quite special.

  10. Anonyrat says:

    So Peskin thinks the ILC is justified because the LHC has ruled out heavier particles; the way forward is high precision measurements of the Higgs?

  11. Peter Woit says:

    anonyrat,

    In an earlier posting I wrote about his recent talk making the case that it still made sense to search for SUSY at ILC energies despite negative LHC results. That seems to me kind of implausible. The precision study of the Higgs does seem to be the best argument for a linear collider. Now that the Higgs mass is known, I wonder if the ILC design will be redone to optimize it for studying the Higgs. Perhaps a lower-cost design is possible if one is not trying to go for higher CM energies.

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