Author: Stephen Sekula

Steve Sekula is an Assistant Professor of Experimental Particle Physics at Southern Methodist University. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2004, and currently spends most of his time either conducting research into the Higgs boson on the ATLAS Experiment or teaching. Oh, and he blogs. We all have flaws.
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Six Months Later

[Originally posted at the SMU at CERN blog: http://blog.smu.edu/smucern/]

It’s been a while since any of us in the SMU ATLAS group have posted. It’s been a busy six months since the announcement of a new particle discovered by the ATLAS and CMS experiments at the Large Hadron Collider. In those six months, and incredible amount of effort has poured into many directions regarding the new particle. We’ve been searching for other ways in which this new particle might decay. We’ve been looking for cousins of this new particle that might, should they exist, teach us more about the greater theory of nature that encompasses the Standard Model and explains more than the Standard Model.

One of the most difficult efforts has gone into trying to measure one of  the new particle’s trickier properties: its quantum numbers.

There is an excellent explanation of one of those quantum numbers, “spin,” given by our post-doctoral researcher, Aidan Randle-Conde, over at his LHC blog:

http://www.quantumdiaries.org/2012/07/16/spinning-out-of-control/ (“Spinning out of control!”)

The SMU group has been involved in all of these, and as more and more of the work we’re involved in becomes public we’ll discuss more what is going on, what we are learning, and where the work will lead us next.