Monthly Archives: June 2010

LHC vs. Tevatron Update

Over the weekend the LHC had a first successful physics run with nominal intensity beams, in 3 bunches. A peak luminosity of about 5 x 1029cm-2s-1 was achieved, and the total integrated luminosity per experiment is now around 30 nb-1. … Continue reading

Posted in Experimental HEP News | 10 Comments

Summer School

This is the time of the year when young particle physicists usually want to go to school, more precisely, a “summer school” held in some pleasant location. These typically have a series of survey lectures on the hot topics of … Continue reading

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String Theory Fan

One of the weirder battles of the String Theory wars became known to some as “trackbackgate”, referring to arguments over the arXiv’s policy of not allowing trackbacks to this blog. I’ve mercifully forgotten the details of the story, other than … Continue reading

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Various and Sundry

Last week’s symposium in Paris on Symmetry, Duality and Cinema now has talks available on-line. These include a very nice survey talk by Edward Frenkel, including some comments on his recent work with Langlands and Ngo that involves an analog … Continue reading

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God Particles Breeding Like Bosons

Science news in the media today is full of stories about Fermilab finding no less than five Higgs particles: God Particles Breeding Like Bosons, The ‘God Particle’ may exist in five forms, Large Hadron Collider’s rival project finds, US experiment … Continue reading

Posted in Experimental HEP News, This Week's Hype | 9 Comments

Predictions From David Gross

Video of David Gross’s talk at the Physics at the LHC 2010 conference is now available. He devotes much of the talk to reviewing predictions he made back in 1993 of what would happen by 2008, and making new predictions … Continue reading

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Millennium Prize Update

The Clay Mathematics Institute this past week sponsored a conference in Paris devoted to celebrating the proof of the Poincare Conjecture. This included a short ceremony on June 8th awarding the Millennium prize to Perelman, which included several laudations explaining … Continue reading

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LHC Update

See here for a new status report on the state of beam commissioning at the LHC. About two weeks ago a peak luminosity of about 2 x 1029cm-2s-1 was reached, using beams with 13 bunches, but each bunch relatively low … Continue reading

Posted in Experimental HEP News | 3 Comments

Not In Our Lifetimes

A report from one of last Saturday’s events at the World Science Festival has string theorists Brian Greene and Shamit Kachru admitting that they’d be surprised to see experimental evidence for string theory in their lifetimes: John Hockenberry, the panel’s … Continue reading

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Through the Wormhole with Morgan Freeman

The Science Channel is starting up yet another show on physics tonight, with Michio Kaku’s Sci-Fi Science and Into the Universe with Steven Hawking being joined by Through the Wormhole with Morgan Freeman. The topics being covered by Freeman are … Continue reading

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