And CMS, in the meantime...

The blogosphere is abuzz with the recent news of a startling new result by DZERO -see the previous post by Jester on this issue by scrolling down- but in the meantime at CERN experimenters are quietly working at their first meaningful physics results, with proton-proton collisions at the highest energies so far achieved.

This morning, after months of work, finally a paper by the CMS collaboration sees the light. Or should I say the pre-light, since the paper has been sent to the Cornell Arxiv, and to Physical Review Letters, but it is so far only a pre-print: the PRL reviewers will need to approve it for publication. Given the excruciatingly long and painful internal review process that the paper has withstood within CMS, by about 5000 eyes (or 2500 pairs if you prefer), I would say there is not a chance that the paper does not pass the standards of PRL now. But maybe it is better to be cautious, so - pre-light!

The paper reports on a measurement of Bose-Einstein correlations between pairs of charged pions recorded by CMS in its early runs at 0.9 and 2.36 TeV of center-of-mass energy. Nothing too exciting, but indeed a nice clean new measurement from data which allows little else at this stage, due to the small luminosity collected by the LHC this far.

I was personally involved in the analysis of the data for this result, so I quite well know how painful it was to produce the paper. But it has left today, so it is time to cheer up. In the meantime, CMS is working at dozens of other publications, which are expected in time for ICHEP. Paris will be brimming with new LHC results, I am sure. Another reason to look forward to it, besides the ephemeral albeit exciting news from the DZERO detector!