There are probably many blogs where you can read summaries of the ICHEP conference — or if not, there will be soon enough — so I’m going to limit myself to telling you about my day. Getting my poster printed and getting it to Paris in one piece was stressful, but uneventful in the end, and once I got to the conference things were easy. The poster session was the first evening, and you can see me at right standing in front of the thing, ready to explain what’s going on. (I will soon post more about the measurement shown in the poster, but here is the official ATLAS conference note, and here is an old summary of some of the concepts.) I didn’t get an overwhelming number of people asking questions — there were an awful lot of posters, which gave me a new perspective on how my work is one tiny facet of our overall effort to understand particle physics — but I did have a few good discussions with interested folks, and the psoter will be up all week.
As for the rest of the conference, I mostly went to the “early LHC experience” sessions, along with a few talks in the Standard Model session. I found the ATLAS and CMS measurments of the W and Z bosons interesting, but mostly because they show how the experiments are getting going. The theory of these particles is very well understood, and the experiments are consistent with it — in fact, if the experiments disagreed the theory at this point, we’d conclude that something had gone wrong with the experiments. When the detectors are solidly understood and working toward precision measurements, they may discover subtle differences from theoretical predictions in this area, but that will be years from now.
And now for another day of conference talks!
Tags: conference, track jets
