December 16, 2015

Diphotons at 750 GeV

December 16, 2015/ Matthew Buckley

Yesterday 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.

November 23, 2015

Recent Paper: Constraining the Strength and CP Structure of Dark Production at the LHC: the Associated Top-Pair Channel

November 23, 2015/ Matthew Buckley

I'm going to describe my most recent paper, written with my now-frequent collaborator, Dorival Gonçalves, postdoc at the IPPP at Durham University. This paper is closely related to Dorival and my previous paper together, which I wrote about here. In fact, this was the project we were working on when we realized what we were doing had application to Higgs physics. When that happened, we decided to drop what we were currently working on and rush out the Higgs-related paper. Then we returned to the original idea, which was to find ways to study dark matter production at the LHC.

November 20, 2015

My favorite dark matter experiment

November 20, 2015/ Matthew Buckley

I keep my eye on the results of a lot of experiments. But there is one type of experiment that is my favorite. Not because necessarily because it yields the strongest bounds, or has the most interesting possible signals or anything, but because the physics behind it is so much fun.

October 08, 2015

Nobelity: Neutrino Oscillations

October 08, 2015/ Matthew Buckley

This week (October 6, 2015), the Nobel Committee announced that Takaaki Kajita and Arthur B. McDonald were awarded this years Nobel Prize in Physics for

"the discovery of neutrino oscillations, which shows that neutrinos have mass"

So what are neutrinos, and why is their oscillation so interesting and Nobel-worthy?

August 08, 2015

Recent Paper: Dark Matter in Leptophilic Higgs Models After the LHC Run-I

August 08, 2015/ Matthew Buckley

In this post, I'll talk about my recent paper, written with my graduate student, David Feld.

This paper is interested in leptophilic Higgs models, and their possible connection to dark matter. I'll explain what those are in a bit. Such models have been considered before, but looking around at the literature, we didn't see a lot that had been updated after the discovery in 2012 of the Higgs boson at 125 GeV. We wanted to see what changed once we folded these new results in to the mix.

August 01, 2015

Recent Paper: Boosting the Direct CP Measurement of the Higgs-Top Coupling

August 01, 2015/ Matthew Buckley

I'm going to describe my most recent paper, written with Dorival Gonçalves, postdoc at the IPPP at Durham University. This is the arXiv version, as is usual in particle physics, we submit to the preprint serve, collect up commentary and citation requests, then get around to submitting to a journal.

July 10, 2015

What Could Dark Matter Be?

July 10, 2015/ Matthew Buckley

But what dark matter? Unfortunately, I don't know. No one knows. But let's go through some of the possibilities anyway.

July 03, 2015

Dimensional Analysis. Or: why is the sky blue?

July 03, 2015/ Matthew Buckley

"Why is the sky blue?" is one of those canonical little kid questions that is shorthand for "inquisitive tiny human confounding their adults."

June 25, 2015

How Big is a Proton? Barns, femtobarns, and the LHC.

June 25, 2015/ Matthew Buckley

...physicists discovered that the uranium atom was really large; at least as far as incredibly microscopic objects go. Everything they threw at it seemed to "hit," so the nucleus was "as big as a barn."