Searches for physics beyond the standard model at the LHC

At the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), protons and heavy ions are accelerated to velocities close to the speed of light and collided in order to study particle interactions and give us an insight to the fundamental laws of nature. The energy and intensity of the particle beams at the LHC are unprecedented, and a tremendous amount of data is collected by three experiments on the circular ring of the LHC that are specialized in proton-proton collisions. The data confirm the most successful theory of particle physics to date known as the standard model of particle physics to very good precision, including the long expected and recently discovered Higgs boson. The standard model cannot, however, accommodate experimentally observed phenomena like gravity, neutrino masses, and dark matter. The theory can also be theoretically unsatisfying as a result of parameters that go unexplained, such as the relatively low value of the Higgs mass despite its large quantum corrections, implying a lack of understanding. For this reason, in addition to precision measurements of standard model observables, experiments search for new physics beyond the standard model that could explain some of the shortcomings of the standard model. A selection of results for searches for new physics beyond the standard model using data recorded by three experiments on the LHC are presented in this talk.Comment: 7 pages, 20 figures. Contribution to the proceedings of the first African Conference on Fundamental Physics and Applications 2018, Namibia. Publication can be found at http://aphysrev.ictp.it/index.php/aphysrev/article/view/1608/58

Endings

Postcard from Jory Gibson, during the Linfield College Year Abroad Program at the Center for Cross-Cultural Study in Seville, Spai

Like Sand through the Hour Glass . . .

Postcard from Jory Gibson, during the Linfield College Year Abroad Program at the Universidad de Alicante, Spai

Development program for a 200 kW, technological processes in space

Dimensionless conservation equations, are presented and the theoretical basis of fluid behavior aboard orbiting satellites are reviewed with application to the processes of manufacturing crystals in weightlessness. The small amount of gravitational acceleration is shown to increase the separation of bands of varying concentration. Natural convection is shown to have no practical effect on crystallization from realistic conductions of weightlessness. The effects of surface tension become increasingly large, and suggestions are made for further research

Which Sustainable Software Practices Do Scientists Find Most Useful?

We studied scientists who attended two-day workshops on basic software skills to determine which tools and practices they found most useful. Our pre- and post-workshop surveys showed increases in self-reported familiarity, while our interviews showed that participants found learning Python more useful than learning the Unix shell, that they found pointers to further resources very valuable, and that background material---the "why" behind the skills---was also very valuable

On the Phase-Space Distribution of Bloch Eigenmodes for Periodic Point Scatterers

Consider the 3-dimensional Laplacian with a potential described by point scatterers placed on the integer lattice. We prove that for Floquet-Bloch modes with fixed quasi-momentum satisfying a certain Diophantine condition, there is a subsequence of eigenvalues of positive density whose eigenfunctions exhibit equidistribution in position space and localisation in momentum space. This result complements the result of Uebersch\"{a}r and Kurlberg who show momentum localisation for zero quasi-momentum in 2-dimensions, and is the first result in this direction in 3-dimensions.Comment: 16 pages, 2 figure

Limit theorems for skew translations

Bufetov, Bufetov-Forni and Bufetov-Solomyak have recently proved limit theorems for translation flows, horocycle flows and tiling flows, respectively. We present here analogous results for skew translations of a torus.Comment: 12 pages, 2 figure