Back now from vacation, and found that there have been quite a few interesting talks at the KITP in Santa Barbara this week which are now available on-line:\t<\/p>\n
About a year ago on this blog, I had the following exchange with a well-informed phenomenologist on this blog:<\/p>\n
If there\u2019s no sign of supersymmetry in this year\u2019s LHC data, how discouraging will this be for those who expect to see supersymmetry at this energy scale?<\/em><\/p>\n
In 2010 data? Not discouraging at all. In 2011 data? Fairly discouraging. In 2014 data? Enormously depressing.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
The LHC has now gathered as much data as expected for all of 2011, so I think that with the negative results, “fairly discouraged” is where SUSY proponents would have expected to be and are now. “Enormously depressed” is on the agenda for late 2014, early 2015, after the LHC reaches design energy.<\/li>\n
Adam Falkowski, the Jester of Resonaances<\/a> fame, also gave an interesting talk this week, on Higgsless theories<\/a>.\n<\/li>\n On the mathematical end of things, Ed Frenkel gave a very nice expository “Blackboard Lunch” talk on What do Fermat’s Last Theorem and Electro-magnetic Duality Have in Common?<\/a>, explaining to physicists a bit about the Langlands program and the connection between geometric Langlands and QFT pioneered by Witten and developed by him and others over the past few years. For something more technical with newer ideas about the relationships between TQFT, gauge theory and representation, see David Ben-Zvi’s talk on Geometric Character Theory<\/a>.<\/li>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Back now from vacation, and found that there have been quite a few interesting talks at the KITP in Santa Barbara this week which are now available on-line: Since the EPS-HEP conference last month, the “First Year of the LHC” … Continue reading