I AMsterdam String Workshop 2012

During the last two weeks I participated in the 2012 edition of the Amsterdam String Workshop. Old and new faces were attending daily. A light format of two talks per day ( you can check the program here ) made it easy to interact and discuss with collaborators.

Traditions: the Cargese Summer School

Everyone working in high energy physics has attended at least once the Cargese Summer School held every two years since 1972 at the Institut d'Etudes Scientifiques in Corecega, France. I had the chance this year to attend and the lecturers included:

T. Banks (UCSC),  Z. Bern (UCLA),  E. Bergshoeff (Groningen),  H. Elvang (Michigan),  M. Gaberdiel (ETH), S. Grushevsky (Stony Brook),  A. Hanany (Imperial College),  R. Janik (Cracow),  Z. Komardogski (IAS and Weizmann Institute),  S. Minwalla (TIFR),  K. Schalm (Leiden),  A. Strominger (Harvard),  S. Vandoren (Utrecht).

During the traditional Gong show we  -- the participants -- had to explain in only two minutes what we are working on. I was first and this is my very compressed presentation on my latest paper arXiv:1204.1284   ---->



Can you guess who the person behind the camera is as well as who the moderator (on the right) and the chairman (on the left) are ???

Everyone has something to say on the Higgs. Also Juan Maldacena.

Early start for many and even queuing overnight to get a spot in the main auditorium @CERN as we could see throughout the internet. After a couple of hours the message was out: a new particle with a mass of 126 GeV had been discovered and everything hints that it is the spinless Higgs boson. We will have to wait for the complete analysis of CMS and ATLAS (both experiments @CERN) to know the details such as its spin to really declare that it is The Higgs. But the mass of this particle is a very good start! More details on the measurements will be presented -- 9am CMS and 9:15am ATLAS -- on Saturday in the conference in Australia that can be followed live: ICHEP2012 webcast. WARNING: the conference is in Australia EST-timezone so check your local time.

There was a lot of excitement after the talks and everyone had something to say. In our community the most famous person is Juan Maldacena and he had a newspaper article today in the argentinean newspaper La Nacion and as he says much remains to be elucidated. Check Juan Maldacena's newspaper article in spanish or this one translated into english.

Rumour Has It: Higgs spotted

There are not to many times in a physicist life in which a major discovery is made. Tomorrow at 9am (Europe) one of this onetime events is scheduled. As everything indicates a joint announcement between CMS and ATLAS of more than 5 sigma proclaiming that they have found the Higgs particle will take place. Everyone is invited to watch the LHC-webcast @CERN although as I have found out from the BBC there are also very special guests. These are the authors of the three 1964 theoretical papers where the existence of this particle was predicted. I had a look this week and this is how story was written:

1) on June 26 the first paper was submitted to PRL by Englert+Brout (published on Aug. 31)
2) on Aug. 31 the second paper was submitted to PRL by Higgs alone (published on Oct. 19)
3) on Oct. 18 the third paper of the saga was submitted to PRL by Guralnik+Hagen+Kibbles (published on Nov. 16)

The expectations are huge and the rumors do have it all: Higgs spotted @ the airport in his way to Geneva.

For me this is very special.  Many years ago, while bored reading about particles on a popular science book during summertime in Argentina I found out about the missing Higgs particle and decided that I was going to become a theoretical physicist.