Brookhaven Forum 2013 Day 2 Blog II

This session is more on strongly interacting stuff, so I'm less optimistic, this being somewhat away from my primary interests.  We'll see.

Brookhaven Forum 2013 Day 2

So, yesterday was a pretty good day that reminded me just how much I enjoy conferences.  Hopefully today can continue to deliver.  Conference Website

Brookhaven Forum Live Blog IV

First Parallel session.  Conference website

Abhishek Kumar, Searching for Very Light Stops

• Stops relevant for naturalness, take the case m_stop < m_top.
• Non-standard stop decays: b-W-neutralino with W on/off shell, c-neutralino.
• Use MFV to handle the flavour-violating decays.
• Flavour-violating decay can dominate over four-body decay, even when both are allowed.  Depends on left/right handed nature of lightest stop.
• ISR needed to account for MET properly.
• Limits up to ~250 GeV.

Sujeet Akula, Gluino-driven Radiative Breaking in Grand Unified Supergravity

• Pointed towards Higgs to two photons, among other things, as evidence for light sleptons
• Of course, also lots of things that push SUSY scale up.
• Good talk, but too long on the background.  Get to what's new before you run out of time!
• Basic structure: gluino mass at GUT scale is much larger than the other soft masses.
• Heavy gluino drives squarks heavy and radiatively breaks EWSB.
• Higgsino mass mu also driven large.
• Large seems to mean a factor of 10.
• Non-universal gaugino masses need non-trivial GUT-scale Higgses.

This is claiming a lot for only tweaking the CMSSM by one number.

Eva Popenda, Squark Pair Production at NLO matched with Parton Showers

• NLO standard is Prospino, which assumes that all squarks degenerate.
• Go beyond that for the first time in an event generator.
• This is all a bit technical for me.
• Even when squarks degenerate, subchannel cross sections disagree: Prospino assumption (all subchannels identical) not exact.
• NLO corrections can give ~20% corrections to shapes of distributions.

Brookhaven Forum 2013 Part III

First session after lunch, and we have a cosmology talk from Marc Kamionkowski.

Brookhaven Forum 2013 Live Blog II

New session, new blog.

Brookhaven Forum 2013 Live Blog

For the next two-and-a-half days, I'm attending the Brookhaven Forum 2013.  I was here three years ago, and enjoyed it then.  Sadly I had to miss the last meeting, but I'm glad to be back.  I'm not expecting anything dramatic here, but I'm going to live blog the conference in lieu of taking notes.  This way, I might actually go back and look at what I've written before!

California: 13

So, at current time of writing I'm in a different time zone, continent and even hemisphere to the usual.  Yes, if the title didn't give it away I've travelled to the USA, where I'll be for the next six weeks before moving on to Europe.  Obviously, my blog posting will be unreliable, but what else is new?  I actually expect to get more written now I'm actually on the move than was the case in the last couple of weeks.  For someone who travels a fair amount, I'm very bad at preparing for it; I always get highly stressed right up to the point where I check in at the airport.

This is my first time in California, and it's the thirteenth US state I've visited.  I'm not counting states I've only travelled through; connecting at LAX doesn't let me see anything different from any other major airport, for example.  Thankfully, I'm not in the south of the state, instead in the San Francisco suburbs.  This means I'm not suffering from the weather, a good thing after the Melbourne summer.  Indeed, with the weather hovering between lows of 10C and highs of 20C, I'm almost in love.