Category Archives: Experimental HEP News

Those responsible for the LHC machine are having their yearly meeting this week in Chamonix to discuss the state of the project and plans for the future. Last week a subgroup met to discuss plans for beam commissioning to 3.5 … Continue reading →

No. The CDMS experiment today reported the observation of two events, with an expected background of .8 events (I gather this is a 1.5 sigma result, but there is no arXiv preprint yet). Based on this, the Guardian reports that … Continue reading →

The LHC shut down yesterday for an end-of-year break after a very successful initial period of beam commissioning at beam energies of 450 GeV and 1.18 TeV. Tomorrow at CERN there will be public reports about the state of the … Continue reading →

Just saw this from Tommaso Dorigo, which made me realize that I should get to work and write a blog posting before the CERN press office people wake up. The big news today is that the first collisions at a … Continue reading →

A few minutes ago, one of the beams of the LHC was ramped up to an energy of 1180 GeV, besting the Tevatron’s top beam energy of 980 GeV. Update: Actually the beam was lost at 1040 GeV, which is … Continue reading →

Things evidently went extremely well over the weekend at the LHC, with simultaneous circulating beams achieved this morning. Speculation is that first collisions (at the injection energy of 450 GeV/beam) are imminent. Places for up to the minute information include … Continue reading →

This past winter a combined analysis of data from the two Tevatron experiments showed at 95% confidence level that the Higgs mass could not be in the range 160-170 GeV. This was a better result than expected: statistically the experiments … Continue reading →

Yesterday the LHC Hardware Commissioning Coordination Team announced the end of the 2009 Hardware Commissioning Campaign as all 8 LHC sectors were declared commissioned and ready for beam. A two day checkout period is now underway, which should have the … Continue reading →

The latest official news from CERN about the LHC schedule that I’ve seen is this from DG Rolf Heuer, who doesn’t give specific dates other than “second half of November” for circulating beams, collisions at injection energy soon thereafter, and, … Continue reading →

Last week there was a meeting of HEPAP held in Washington, presentations are available here. HEP has done very well recently in recent US federal government budgets, due to the stimulus and large deficit spending going on to fight the … Continue reading →