Yearly Archives: 2011

Recent NSF Grants

Posted on May 11, 2011 by woit

In responding to a comment on the previous posting, I was curious if one could easily get some data on relative sizes of grants in mathematics and physics, so started to do a quick search on nsf.gov. Among the first … Continue reading →

Posted in Multiverse Mania | 29 Comments

Pricey Strings

Posted on May 11, 2011 by woit

In recent years most of the conferences I’ve attended have been mathematics and mathematical physics ones, and I had noticed that, while modest registration fees were often a feature many years ago, these days most such conferences, especially in the … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 35 Comments

This Week’s Hype

Posted on May 8, 2011 by woit

Philip Gibbs points to an impressive piece of string theory hype from British Channel 4 news. If you watch the clip, you get the latest news about string theory and the LHC: people were getting discouraged about string theory, but … Continue reading →

Posted in This Week's Hype | 21 Comments

Not a Leak

Posted on May 8, 2011 by woit

ATLAS this weekend has finally released their latest analysis of the gamma-gamma invariant mass spectrum, carried out in response to claims from within their collaboration that a 4 sigma Higgs signal had been observed in this channel. The result? Nada: … Continue reading →

Posted in Experimental HEP News | 2 Comments

This Week’s Leak

Posted on May 4, 2011 by woit

Recently there was a bit of a kerfuffle triggered by someone leaking here the abstract of an internal ATLAS document claiming to have found a Higgs signal as a bump in the gamma-gamma invariant mass distribution. After some initial discussion … Continue reading →

Posted in Experimental HEP News | 19 Comments

This Week’s Hype

Posted on April 28, 2011 by woit

This week’s hype comes from an unusual source, John Baez and his ex-student John Huerta, who have a new article in Scientific American entitled The Strangest Numbers in String Theory. The expository article about octonions by John (Baez) that appeared … Continue reading →

Posted in This Week's Hype | 27 Comments

Short Items

Posted on April 27, 2011 by woit

Progress on increasing luminosity at the LHC has been going extremely well, with peak luminosity a few moments ago over 7×1032cm-2s-1. So far integrated luminosity is over 200 pb-1, well on the way to the extremely conservative nominal goal for … Continue reading →

Posted in Experimental HEP News, Multiverse Mania | 31 Comments

This Week’s Rumor

Posted on April 21, 2011 by woit

A commenter on the previous posting has helpfully given us the abstract of an internal ATLAS note claiming observation of a resonance at 115 GeV. It’s the sort of thing you would expect to see if there were a Higgs … Continue reading →

Posted in Experimental HEP News, Favorite Old Posts | 88 Comments

This Week’s Hype

Posted on April 18, 2011 by woit

This week’s string theory hype is brought to you by a press release headlined Dark Matter and String Theory? from the Institut Laue-Langevin in Grenoble, and another one from the Vienna University of Technology. These have led to a BBC … Continue reading →

Posted in This Week's Hype | 34 Comments

No WIMPs

Posted on April 13, 2011 by woit

A commenter points to the long-awaited release of a preprint from the XENON100 experiment giving results from a 100-day run last year. This is the most sensitive dark matter experiment that has released data. The result: with an expected background … Continue reading →

Posted in Experimental HEP News | 106 Comments