The LHC will next week enter a Machine Checkout phase for the 2012 run at 4 TeV/beam, with beam commissioning scheduled to start March 14, the physics run April 7. Meanwhile, the LHC experiments have been for months targeting the Moriond conference which starts today as the time to release their latest analyses of the 2011 LHC data. There is likely to be not much new on the Higgs front from the LHC, since the Higgs results were fast-tracked and released back in December. One thing to expect is further evidence that supersymmetry is hiding very effectively.
The big news is likely to come from the Tevatron, with D0 and CDF releasing their combined Higgs results based upon the full Tevatron data set (the machine was shut down for good last September). The Tevatron data is not enough to provide convincing evidence for a Higgs at the 125 GeV mass now expected based on LHC results. The most likely result is something much like the last one (the Summer 2011 combination is here, and they only have 25% more data since then). Some excess would provide a bit more support to the possibility of the Higgs at 125 GeV. More interesting would be the much less likely result that the Tevatron could rule out a 125 GeV Higgs, in some contradiction with the LHC results, although the Tevatron is mainly sensitive to a different channel than the LHC.
The initial schedule had the big news this morning, SUSY tomorrow, but a revised schedule has put off the most newsworthy announcements until Wednesday (Tevatron Higgs) and Thursday (SUSY).
For some reason, no one has seen fit to leak to me the Tevatron results. If this changes soon, rumors will appear here. Otherwise, since on Wednesday I’m heading off for a 10 day spring break vacation in Paris and Iceland, your best bets for Moriond news will be the usual reliable locations: Resonaances, Tommaso Dorigo, Matt Strassler and Philip Gibbs.
Update: Moriond slides are here. LHCb has a new result constraining CP violation in Bs decays to close to the SM value, see here, press release here. Jester reports on some details from last week about new CDF Higgs results, indicating that maybe the Tevatron will report an excess as expected. Matt Strassler also discusses results from last week, these from CMS, reporting that the multilepton events he got so excited about last year weren’t anything to get excited about.
A reliable rumor-mongering commenter here warns us to take a look at the new LHC fermiophobic Higgs results coming this week.
LHC analyses about fermiophobic higgs could be interesting…
“Paris and Iceland”- weird travel agent? looking for variety? some crpytic link? Paris is spring is famous, but maybe you’ll have volcano weather too.
ohwilleke,
Iceland is on the way back home from Paris, courtesy of Icelandair, and I’ve never been there. Hoping to see Northern lights, a volcano, geysers, glaciers and waterfall, ideally all at the same time, while trying tasty putrefied whale meat.
Some Iceland in photos.
http://www.parrikar.com/blog/category/iceland/
Hope you have a great time!
(Those photos are by a friend).
What is a fermiophobic Higgs ?
You’ve missed the : after http in the link to the slides.
Anon,
Thanks, fixed.
pakri,
In my not well-informed understanding, in “fermiophobic” models, the Higgs couples to itself and gauge fields to give electroweak symmetry breaking, but it doesn’t couple to fermions (no Yukawas). Maybe an expert can say more, I’m definitely not one, and it’s not clear to me that it makes sense to set Yukawas to zero once you have something coupling like a Higgs to gauge fields. We’ll probably hear a lot more if there’s an unexpected LHC result about this.
About fermiophobic Higgs: there is this new ATLAS paper where with 4.9 fb-1 of data they see a 1.6 sigma excess at 125.5 GeV. So while not at all definite I’m quite curious to see what will happen with more data…
Apparently CMS in a recent paper about their own fermiophobic searches have looked at 4.8fb-1 of data, and saw a 1.2 sigma excess at about 126 GeV. Very similar to what ATLAS sees then, but of course these are small excesses.
Still, I wonder what experts think. And also, how many sigmas the combination would provide (hopefully someone like Phil Gibbs may be interested in doing a quick unofficial one…).
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