Sunday, March 04, 2012

The LHC blues

Ok, I am being deliberately a little bit negative in the title. But the sad truth is that the runs of the LHC at the 7 TeV centre of mass energy have been somewhat bit disappointing in the respect of bringing us confirmed new physic. It has been a long time since my last post in this blog (I have keep posting in my Spanish blog) and in the while there were some interesting claims, extensively reported in the blogosphera such as the famous OPERA maybe super-luminous neturinos and the corresponding maybe rectifications. Also there were some claims about anomalies in LHC b related to CP symmetry violation, recently confirmed by the CDF analysis. A pity that this can be own to bad calculations in QCD and not to new physic. This negative results have also meant that most of phenomenological models for new physics have been driven into a very bad position. The only real almost discovering has been a Higgs at 125 TeV. Now we are near to a restart of the LHC activity to a somewhat increased energy, 8 TeV. And it is expected a lot more luminosity (around 19 fb^-1). So, maybe some new physics could appear, or maybe not. In the purely theoretical side I have not seen any revolutionary paper, and not even a simple "good although not amazing" one. At most some curious ideas that are beautiful but not particularly useful. Ok, again maybe I have been too negative again, but if you compare the amount of exciting new results in physic with the ones in fields such as consume technology (with a mobile/tablet revolution going on) and the revision that society and economy are undergoing right now high energy physics is going very slow. Anyway, I have keep reading most blogs, some of the new papers and rereading with care some not so new ones so I will come to blog again with some more regularity. Of course if the LHC is merciful enough to give as some new physic to deal with I will be happier with the task ;).