Various things of interest, ordered in terms of increasing mathematical content:<\/p>\n
This week Fermilab has hosted a P5 meeting<\/a> and an annual program review<\/a>. <\/p>\n At the P5 meeting, Fermilab director Pier Oddone made the case<\/a> for planning to keep running the Tevatron through FY 2010. He pointed out that the current LHC schedule has “no float” for any possible delays in putting the hardware together, and only allows for 3 months between first beam and physics collisions, drawing the conclusion that it was unlikely the LHC would have physics results competitive with the Tevatron before the currently planned closure date of September 2009. Presentations from D0<\/a> and CDF<\/a> claimed that, if the machine runs through FY2010 and provides them with a projected luminosity of 6.8 fb-1<\/sup>, they should be able to exclude the possibility of existence of the Higgs at 95% confidence level over almost the entire possible range of Higgs masses (if it isn’t there!) or find 3 sigma evidence for its existence in some mass ranges (if it is).<\/p>\n At the program review, there was an overview of particle theory at FNAL from Andreas Kronfeld<\/a>, and a presentation about the LQCD lattice gauge theory project from Paul MacKenzie<\/a>. Several interesting documents reviewing the state of the lattice gauge theory work are here<\/a>.<\/p>\n Over the last few months I’ve often told myself that I should learn more about Howard Georgi’s ideas concerning “unparticles” and try and write something about them. Sabine Hossenfelder has saved me the trouble, you can learn about this here<\/a>.<\/p>\n Last month there was a symposium at Durham on Twistors, Strings and Scattering Amplitudes<\/a>, a subject which has seen some exciting activity recently. Zvi Bern<\/a> reviewed progress on computing multi-loop amplitudes in N=4 gauge theory and in gravity theories. He noted that the recently found unexpected one-loop cancellations in N=8 supergravity (leading to the so-called “no triangle hypothesis”) are not due to supersymmetry and are already there in non-supersymmetric gravity. This leads him to conjecture that other gravity theories will be perturbatively finite, he explicitly mentions N=6 supergravity. Nathan Berkovits<\/a> discussed multi-loop superstring amplitudes in the pure spinor formalism, ending up by noting that there are possible problems caused by needed regularization of ghosts in this formalism, and they affect high-energy contributions to the 4 point 3-loop amplitudes. Not that I’m saying I think this will happen, but it would be pretty damn funny if it turns out that multi-loop superstring amplitudes aren’t finite, multi-loop supergravity ones are…. There’s also a talk<\/a> by Jacques Distler, who continues his ceaseless quest to figure out how to make physics available over the web in a form that no virtually no web-browser can display properly.<\/p>\n Finally, I strongly believe in advertising equivariant cohomology as much as possible, for mathematicians and for physicists. The new lecture notes<\/a> by Matvei Libine are a good place to read about it. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Various things of interest, ordered in terms of increasing mathematical content: This week Fermilab has hosted a P5 meeting and an annual program review. At the P5 meeting, Fermilab director Pier Oddone made the case for planning to keep running … Continue reading