{"id":8608,"date":"2016-06-21T15:34:28","date_gmt":"2016-06-21T19:34:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=8608"},"modified":"2016-06-22T07:00:12","modified_gmt":"2016-06-22T11:00:12","slug":"rumor-mongering","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=8608","title":{"rendered":"Rumor Mongering"},"content":{"rendered":"

Since I don’t see why Resonaances<\/a> should have all the fun, I guess I’ll post something here about the big upcoming news of the summer: is the 750 GeV diphoton bump still there in the 2016 LHC data? We’re very soon about to hit a major fork in the road for high energy physics: if the bump is there, the field will be revolutionized and dominated by this for years, ft it’s not, we’re back to the usual frustrating grind.<\/p>\n

Last year’s tentative signal was based upon 3.2 inverse fb of 2015 data, and as of today the experiments have over 6 inverse fb of new 2016 data. One can guess that within ATLAS and CMS, plots have started to circulate of preliminary analyses of some sizable fraction of the new data, and some number of people now know which fork we’re headed down, a number that will grow to 6000 or so in coming weeks.<\/p>\n

If you’re not one of those, you could try accessing this data indirectly, using a model of how the CERN administration works. According to this presentation<\/a> at LHCP this past weekend<\/p>\n

the next major update of physics results from the LHC is at the ICHEP 2016 Conference, August 2016, Chicago<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

and<\/p>\n

CERN management is in regular contacts with the experiments\u2019 Spokespersons. It is agreed that any significant (i.e. discovery-like) result (such as the 750 GeV bump becoming a signal or other) has first to be announced in a seminar at CERN.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

No detailed schedule yet for ICHEP, but the first day of plenary talks there is scheduled for Monday August 8. My CERN-modeling suggests that the two forks in the road will correspond to the following two possibilities<\/p>\n