This week begins the 34th International Conference on High Energy Physics (ICHEP). The conference is being held in Philadelphia. While this presents much less of an interesting travel story [1], this conference may prove to be quite interesting. The LHC has not yet started operations, so this will be the last conference before the LHC begins to dominate the buzz in the community. The flavor factories – BaBar, Belle, and CLEO-c – and the Tevatron will get the spotlight almost to themselves this time around, perhaps for the last time. The many dark matter, cosmic ray, gamma ray, and neutrino experiments will also be in the spotlight. We’ll all be eager, of course, to hear about the status of the LHC.
I’ll be there for almost the entire conference, arriving Tuesday night and leaving the following Tuesday afternoon. If you’ll be at the conference, make sure to look me up. My talk is Friday evening, and is entitled “Recent Searches for Exotic Physics at the BaBar Experiment.” I’ll be sandwiched between Tevatron and other experiments who tend to dominate this topic. I can’t wait to get there, and I can’t wait to see what the rest of the community has in store.
