This week is the ICHEP2016 meeting in Chicago, which serves as one of the major summer conferences where experiments release their accumulated results. One of the most anticipated results this year was the update on the diphoton anomaly which was found in ATLAS and CMS data collected last year in the first bit of 13 TeV data from the LHC.
Read MoreThe first part of this is a non-specialist description of the results of Moriond concerning the diphoton anomaly. About halfway through it will transition into a more technical discussion, including new plots I've made giving my theorist-level combinations of the data shown.
Read MorePretty much everything I know now about the anomaly at 750 GeV. Read this, and you'll know it too. It’s nothing too certain, but I expected that going in. 3.6σand 2.6σ is just not that much significance to start with, so any question I ask would have conflicting and uncertain results, with at best only minor preferences for any particular result. But I internalized a lot about the experimental results by forcing myself to grind through the data, and once you’ve done that much work it seemed silly not to write a paper about it.
Read MoreYesterday was the first data release of the LHC Run-II, and there has been a lot of interest in the first hints of something new. I’m skeptical, and wishing for more data. There are some suspicious tensions with previous results, but it’s certainly not clearly wrong, and its definitely the most intriguing sign of something new since the Higgs discovery. Unfortunately, we’ll have to wait at least a year to get more data to directly speak to this anomaly. It will be a difficult wait. But while we wait, read this to find out more of what we're looking at.
Read MoreQuestions? Comments? Ask me on BlueSky @physicsmatt
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