Around 140 physicists convened for one of the first in-person international particle-physics conferences in the COVID-19 era. The Moriond conference on electroweak interactions and unified theories, which took place from 12 to 19 March on the Alpine slopes of La Thuile in Italy, was a wonderful chance to meet friends and colleagues, to have spontaneous exchanges, to listen to talks and to prolong discussions over dinner.
The LHC experiments presented a suite of impressive results based on increasingly creative and sophisticated analyses, including first observations of rare Standard Model (SM) processes and the most recent insights in the search for new physics. ATLAS reported the first observation of the production of a single top quark in association with a photon, a rare process that is sensitive to the existence of new particles. CMS observed for the first time the electroweak production of a pair of opposite-sign W bosons, which is crucial to investigate the mechanism of electroweak symmetry breaking. The millions of Higgs bosons produced so far at the LHC have enabled detailed measurements and open a new window on rare phenomena, such as the rate of Higgs-boson decays to a charm quark–antiquark pair. CMS presented the world’s most stringent constraint on the coupling between the Higgs boson and the charm quark, improving their previous measurement by more than a factor of five, while ATLAS measurements demonstrated that it is weaker than the coupling between the Higgs boson and the bottom quark. On the theory side, various new signatures for extended Higgs sectors were proposed.
The LHC experiments presented a suite of impressive results based on increasingly creative and sophisticated analyses
Of special interest is the search for heavy resonances decaying to high-mass dijets. CMS reported the observation of a spectacular event with four high transverse-momentum jets, forming an invariant mass of 8 TeV. CMS now has two such events, exceeding the SM prediction with a local significance of 3.9σ, or 1.6σ when taking into account the full range of parameter space searched. Moderate excesses with a global significance of 2–2.5σ were observed in other channels, for example in a search by ATLAS for long-lived, heavy charged particles and in a search by CMS for new resonances that decay into two tau pairs. Data from Run 3 and future High-Luminosity LHC runs will show whether these excesses are statistical fluctuations of the SM expectation or signals of new physics.
Flavour anomalies
The persistent set of tensions between predictions and measurements in semi-leptonic b → s ℓ+ℓ– decays (ℓ = e, μ) were much discussed. LHCb has used various decay modes mediated by strongly suppressed flavour-changing neutral currents to search for deviations from lepton flavour universality (LFU). Other measurements of these transitions, including angular distributions and decay rates (for which the predictions are affected by troublesome hadronic corrections) as well as analyses of charged-current b→ cτ– ν decays from BaBar, Belle and LHCb also show a consistent pattern of deviations from LFU. While none are individually significant enough to constitute clear evidence of new physics, they represent an intriguing pattern that can be explained by the same new-physics models. Theoretical talks on this subject proposed additional observables (based on baryon decays or leptons at high transverse momenta) to get more information on operators beyond the SM that would contribute to the anomalies. Updates from LHCb on several b → s ℓ+ℓ–-related measurements with the full Run 1 and Run 2 datasets are eagerly awaited, while Belle II also has the potential to provide essential independent checks. The integrated SuperKEKB luminosity has now reached a third of the full Belle dataset, with Belle II presenting several impressive new results. These include measurements of the b → s ℓ+ℓ– decay branching fractions with a precision limited by the sample size and precise measurements of charmed particle lifetimes, including the individual world-best D and Λ+c lifetimes, proving the excellent tracking and vertexing capabilities of the detector.
The other remarkable deviation from the SM prediction is the anomalous magnetic moment of the muon (g–2)μ, for which the SM prediction and the recent Fermilab measurement stand 4.2σ apart – or less, depending on whether the hadronic vacuum polarisation contribution to (g–2)μ is calculated using traditional “dispersive” methods or a recent lattice QCD calculation. The jury is still out on the theory side, but the ongoing analysis of Run 2 and Run 3 data at Fermilab will soon reduce the statistical uncertainty by more than a factor of two. The hottest issues in neutrinos – in particular their masses and mixing – were reviewed. The current leading long-baseline experiments – NOvA in the US and T2K in Japan – have helped to refine our understanding of oscillations, but the neutrino mass hierarchy and CP-violating phase remain to be determined. A great experimental effort is also being devoted to the search for neutrinoless double-beta decay (NDBD) which, if found, would prove that neutrinos are Majorana particles and have far-reaching implications in cosmology and particle physics. The GERDA experiment at Gran Sasso presented its final result, placing a lower limit on the NDBD half-life of 1.8 × 1026 years.
While tensions between solar-neutrino bounds and the reactor antineutrino anomaly are mostly resolved, the gallium anomaly remains
Another very important question is the possible existence of “sterile” neutrinos that do not participate in weak interactions, for which theoretical motivations were presented together with the robust experimental programme. The search for sterile neutrinos is motivated by a series of tensions in short-baseline experiments using neutrinos from accelerators (LSND, Mini-BooNE), nuclear reactors (the “reactor antineutrino anomaly”) and radioactive sources (the “gallium anomaly”), which cannot be accounted for by the standard three-neutrino framework. In particular, MicroBooNE has neither confirmed nor excluded the electron-like low-energy excess observed by MiniBooNE. While tensions between solar-neutrino bounds and the reactor antineutrino anomaly are mostly resolved, the gallium anomaly remains.
Dark matter and cosmology
The status of dark-matter searches both at the LHC and via direct astrophysical searches was comprehensively reviewed. The ongoing run of the 5.9 tonne XENONnT experiment, for example, should elucidate the 3.3σ excess observed by XENON1T in low-energy electron recoil events. The search for axions, which provide a dark-matter candidate as well as a solution to the strong-CP problem, cover different mass ranges depending on the axion coupling strength. The parameter space is wide, and Moriond participants heard how a discovery could happen at any moment thanks to experiments such as ADMX. The status of the Hubble tension was also reviewed.
The many theory talks described various beyond-the-SM proposals – including extra scalars and/or fermions and/or gauge symmetries – aimed at explaining LFU violation, (g–2)μ, the hierarchy among Yukawa couplings, neutrino masses and dark matter. Overall, the broad spectrum of informative presentations brilliantly covered the present status of open questions in phenomenological high-energy physics and shine a light on the many rich paths that demand further exploration.
