Involving around 1500 participants, 17 parallel sessions, 900 talks and 250 posters, ICHEP2022 (which took place in Bologna from 6 to 13 July) was a remarkable week of physics, technology and praxis. The energy and enthusiasm among the more than 1200 delegates who were able to attend in person was palpable. As the largest gathering of the community since the beginning of the pandemic – buoyed by the start of LHC Run 3 and the 10th anniversary of the Higgs-boson discovery – ICHEP2022 served as a powerful reminder of the importance of non-digital interactions.
Roberto Tenchini’s (INFN Pisa) heroic conference summary began with a reminder: it is 10 years since ICHEP included a session titled “Standard Model”, the theory being so successful that it now permeates most sessions. As an example, he highlighted cross-section predictions tested over 14 orders of magnitude at the LHC. Building on the Higgs@10 symposium at CERN on 4 July, the immense progress in understanding the properties and interactions of the Higgs boson (including legacy results with full Run 2 statistics in two papers by ATLAS and CMS published in Nature on 4 July) was centre stage. CERN Director-General Fabiola Gianotti gave a sweeping tour of the path to discovery and emphasised the connections between the Higgs boson and profound structural problems in the SM. Many speakers highlighted the concomitant role of the Higgs boson in exploring new physics, dashing notions that future precision measurements are “business as usual”. Chiara Mariotti (INFN Torino) pointed out that only 3% of the total Higgs data expected at the LHC has been analysed so far.
Hot topics
Another hot electroweak topic was CDF’s recent measurement of the mass of the W boson, as physicists try to understand what could cause it to lie so far from its prediction and from previous measurements. Andrea Rizzi (Pisa) confirmed that CMS is working hard on a W-mass analysis that will bring crucial information, on a time-scale to be decided. Patience is king with such a complex analysis, he said: “we are really trying to do the measurement the way we want to do it.”
CMS presented a total of 85 parallel talks and 28 posters, including new searches related to b-anomalies with taus, and the most precise measurement of Bs → μ+μ–. Among new results presented by ATLAS in 71 parallel talks and 59 posters were the observation of a four charm–quark state consistent with one seen by LHCb, joint-polarisation measurements of the W and Z bosons, and measurements of the total proton–proton cross section and the ratio of the real vs imaginary parts of the elastic-scattering amplitude. ATLAS and CMS also updated participants on many searches for new particles, in particular leptoquarks. Among highlights were searches by ATLAS for events with displaced vertices, which could be caused by long-lived particles, and by CMS for resonances decaying to Higgs bosons and pairs of either photons or b quarks, which show interesting excesses. “Se son rose fioriranno!” said Tenchini.
The sigmas are rather higher for exotic hadrons. LHCb presented the discovery of a new strange pentaquark (with a minimum quark content ccuds) and two tetraquarks (one corresponding to the first doubly charged open-charm tetraquark with csud), taking the number of hadrons discovered at the LHC so far to well over 60, and introducing a new exotic-hadron naming scheme for “particle zoo 2.0” (Exotic hadrons brought into order by LHCb). LHCb also reported the first evidence for direct CP violation in the charm system (LHCb digs deeper in CP-violating charm decays) and a new precise measurement of the CKM angle γ. Vladimir Gligorov (LPNHE) described how, in addition to the flavour factories LHCb and Belle II, experiments including ATLAS, CMS, BESIII, NA62 and KOTO will be crucial to enable the next level of understanding in quark mixing. Despite no significant new results having been presented, the status of tests of lepton flavour universality (LFU) in B decays by LHCb generated lively discussions, while Toshinori Mori (Tokyo) described exciting prospects for LFU tests in charged-lepton flavour experiments, in particular MEG-II, which has just started operations at PSI, and the upcoming Mu2e and MUonE experiments.
ICHEP2022 served as a powerful reminder of the importance of non-digital interactions
Moving to leptons that are known to mix, neutrinos continue to play very important roles in understanding the smallest and largest scales, said Takaaki Kajita (Tokyo) via a link from the IUPAP Centennial Symposium taking place in parallel at ICTP Trieste. Status reports on DUNE, Hyper-K, JUNO, KM3NeT and SNB showed how these detectors will help constrain the still poorly-known PNMS matrix that describes leptonic mixing, while new results from NOvA and STEREO further reveal anomalous behaviour. Among the major open questions in neutrino physics summed-up by theorist Joachim Kopp (Mainz and CERN) were: how do neutrinos interact? What explains the oscillation anomalies? And how do supernova neutrinos oscillate?
Several plenary presentations showcased the increasing complementarity with astroparticle physics and cosmology, with the release of the first-science images from the James Webb Space Telescope on 12 July adding spice (Webb opens new era in observational astrophysics). Multiband gravitational-wave astronomy across 12 or more orders of magnitude in frequency will bloom in the next decade, predicted Giovanni Andrea Prodi (Trento), while larger datasets and synchronisation of experiments offer a bright future in all messengers, said Gwenhael De Wasseige (Louvain): “We are just at the beginning of the story.” The first results from the Lux–Zeplin experiment were presented, setting the tightest limits on spin-independent WIMP–nucleon cross-sections for WIMP masses above 9 GeV (CERN Courier September/October 2022 p13), while the increasingly crowded plot showing limits from direct searches for axions illustrate the vibrancy and shifting focus of dark-matter research. Indeed, among several sessions devoted to the exploration of high-energy QCD in heavy-ion, proton–lead and proton–proton collisions, Andrea Dainese (INFN Padova) described how the LHC is not only a collider of nuclei but an (anti-)nuclei factory relevant for dark-matter searches.
The unique ability of theorists to put numerous results and experiments in perspective was on full display. We should all renew the enthusiasm that built the LHC, and be a lot more outspoken about the profound ideas we explore, urged Veronica Sanz (Sussex); after all, she said, “we are searching for something that we know should be somewhere.” A timely talk by Gavin Salam (Oxford) summarised the latest understanding of QCD effects relevant to the muon g-2 and W-mass anomalies and also to future Higgs-boson measurements, concluding that, as we approach high precision, we should expect to be confronted by conceptual problems that we could, so far, ignore.
The unique ability of theorists to put numerous results and experiments in perspective was on full display
Accelerators (including a fast-paced summary of the HL-LHC niobium-tin magnet programme from Lucio Rossi), detectors (68 talks and posters revealing an increasingly holistic approach to detector design), computing (highlighting a period of rapid evolution thanks to optimisation, modernisation, machine-learning algorithms and increasing hardware diversity), industry, diversity and outreach were addressed in detail. A highly acclaimed outreach event in Bologna’s Piazza Maggiore on the evening of 12 July saw thousands of people listen to Fabiola Gianotti, Guido Tonelli, Gian Giudice and Antonio Zoccoli discuss the implications of the Higgs-boson discovery.
Only the narrowest snapshot of proceedings is possible in such a short report. What was abundantly clear from ICHEP2022 is that, following the discovery of the Higgs boson and as-yet no new particles beyond the SM, the field is in a fascinating and challenging period where confusion is more than matched by confidence that new physics must exist. The strategic direction of the field was addressed in two wide-ranging round-table discussions where laboratory directors and senior physicists answered questions submitted by participants. Much discussion concerned future colliders, and addressed a perceived worry in some quarters that the field is entering a period of decline. For anyone following the presentations at ICHEP2022, nothing could be further from the truth.
