Day one -- afternoon

I haven't been able to live-blog yesterday's afternoon session, so here there are only the parts of the heavy quark sessions that stuck with me for some reason or another:

CDF has observed two new decays of the B_s meson that are both Cabbibo and colour suppressed, namely B_s --> J/ψ K^* and B_s --> J/ψ K_S, with a significance of over 7σ.

BELLE has observed charmless B_s decays B_s --> K⁺K-, but no B_s --> Kπ or B_s --> ππ decays. They have also observed B_s --> D_s^*π, B_s --> D_s^*ρ, and B_s --> D_sρ decays.

Nicolas Garron spoke about the determination of the bottom quark mass and the B_s decay constant in nonperturbative Heavy Quark Effective Theory (HQET) on the lattice. This approach is based on a fully nonperturbative lattice formulation of HQET, the effective theory obtained by expanding QCD in powers of the inverse heavy quark mass. Using this formulation, one can nonperturbatively match HQET to QCD on a very fine (and hence necessarily very small) lattice and thus determine the HQET couplings, which then can be extended to larger lattices and be used to make predictions. The results presented were still for quenched (i.e. N_f=0) QCD, but the calculation of N_f=2 results is far advanced.

The poster session took place in the evening. Since I had a poster to present myself, I didn't really get to discuss any posters with their presenters. At the reception afterwards, the food was very nice, but was hard to obtain because the density of physicists approached a singularity near the plates.