Here’s a roundup of recent CERN-related news:
- The status of the LHC and the LHC experiments was discussed here yesterday. The LHC shutdown is more or less on track, first beams at 13 TeV total energy Jan. 2015, physics starting April 2015.
- Both ATLAS and CMS have announced new data on tau-tau decays of the Higgs, providing stronger evidence for this signal than was available earlier. ATLAS sees a signal with significance 4.1 sigma, CMS at 3.4 sigma. These results are consistent with the SM, and rule out some SUSY alternatives in which the Higgs would behave differently. The Register headlines this Exotic physics takes an arrow to the knee.
- Not CERN related, but the last month or so has seen other new results ruling out some SUSY and other SM-alternatives. A good place to follow this is at Resonaances, where Jester discusses the LUX result on dark matter, and the new limits on the electron EDM.
- Plans are being made for long-term preservation of LHC data, keeping it in a usable form for the future. Nature has a story here, this this presentation has more detail.
- Meanwhile, CMS has a pilot project going to make some data available publicly in a form that can be accessed by high-school students.
- CERN DG Heuer has this announcement about activities of the FCC (Future Circular Colliders) study group looking into prospects for a large lepton collider (TLEP) as well as a higher energy hadron collider post-LHC.
- The CERN-sponsored SCOAP3 open access publishing initiative will start operation next month. From their web-site, it appears the idea is to spend up to 10 million euros/year, mostly going to commercial publishers to finance their journals that publish HEP papers. In return the papers (almost all of which were already accessible on the arXiv) will be “open access”. The publishers will get paid a per-article charge, so will have a serious incentive to publish as many articles as they can. I don’t see a document explaining exactly how the money will be spent, but for some idea of where it will go, see this list. It indicates that the two big recipients will be Elsevier (with 1300 or so papers/year in Physics Letters B and Nuclear Physics B, at around $2000 per paper) and some combination of Springer and SISSA where about 1650 JHEP papers will cost 1200 Euros each. I gather that in return for this the journals will reduce or eliminate subscription charges, but don’t know the details.
The Resonaances link you posted appears to discuss only the electron EDM, not neutron. As far as I’m aware, there hasn’t been an update to the experimental neutron EDM value recently, though there are several experiments that are either in planning or ongoing to push the upper limit of the nEDM closer to the SM prediction (as well as various BSM predictions which could show up at several orders of magnitude higher than the expected SM value).
PhysGrad,
Fixed. Thanks!
“at 13 GeV total energy Jan. 2015” –> “at 13 TeV total energy Jan. 2015”
Thanks Bernhard, fixed.
I seem to make this mistake a lot, maybe it has something to do with early experiences where this was the right scale for a collider energy…
Indeed, this would be quite interesting. It’s become standard practice to eschew copyediting altogether or to provide a simulacrum obtained at rates that guarantee inadequacy. A quick look at Nucl. Phys. B. and JHEP reveals predictably amateurish “typesetting” of the LaTeX-is-a-magic-incantation variety (when you manage to accomplish poor spacing on wide measure, you’re simply bad at the job). What’s left? Driving everybody up the wall with an awful peer-review “management system”? Dealing with the occasional MS Word document? A little bit of thoughtless art processing? Adding pointless internal links that may not even work right? (JHEP’s figure links are putting the end of the figure legend at the top of the page.) Serving proofs and not bungling the corrections? Spitting out some sort of shockingly ugly HTML and delivering it on a nightmarishly crufty platform à la Elsevier?
Perhaps the name should be changed from “processing charge” to something more transparent, because I’ve yet to find anything resembling $2000 worth of actual work on any given paper. In fact, in the case of JHEP, I’m not finding anything resembling anybody’s even having looked at anything in the first place: “$p_{\rm T}$ -cut”, with the space, is in both the published version and nucl-ex/1307.1249.