The global nature of modern particle physics was clearly manifest at the biennial Lepton Photon conference that took place this year in India. The Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR), Mumbai, was host to the 25th International Symposium on Lepton Photon Interactions at High Energies – Lepton Photon 2011 – on 22–27 August.
The conference opened with a welcome from Mustansir Barma, director of TIFR, and speeches by Srikumar Banerjee, chair of the Atomic Energy Commission, Shri Prithviraj Chavan, the Chief Minister of the State of Maharashtra, and Patricia McBride, chair of the C11 Committee of the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics, under whose auspices the Lepton Photon conferences take place.
Image credit: Lepton Photon 2011.
New results from the LHC and the latest news on searches for the Higgs boson were among the highlights, as at the EPS-HEP 2011 meeting held in Grenoble in July. Thanks to the outstanding performance of the LHC, the experiments and the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid, some of the results were from analyses based on roughly twice the data sample presented in Grenoble. With the additional data analysed, the ATLAS and CMS experiments have now excluded the existence of a Higgs over most of the mass region 145–466 GeV with 95% confidence level. Moreover, the significance of hints of a Higgs signal has slightly decreased and it remains the case that the slight excess observed could be the effect of statistical fluctuations.
The talks covered a range of other physics that is being investigated by the LHC experiments. These included precision measurements in top-quark physics, for example, and in B physics, where results from the LHCb experiment on B mesons are becoming the most precise yet. There were also reports on the status and prospects of the LHC machine and, by CERN’s direct general, Rolf Heuer, on the future of colliders after the LHC.
Reports on some of the results presented at the conference follow on the next two pages.
• For the conference programme and presentations, see http://www.tifr.res.in/~lp11/.
