End of Part One

Sunday... Time for a rest for the participants... as well as for the organisers. Obviously, the last three days were quite hectic for me, since I had both kinds of duties (hard to explain to sa colleague that you see only once every two years that you must post first then discuss physics afterwards). Thus it was not really blogging time for me, as we had a few things to sort out here and there.

As expected, I followed quite extensively the flavour-related sessions. Obviously, now that Babar and Belle have intensively studied the Bd and B+ mesons, the Bs meson is the focus of all interests -- which explains the large crowd gathering in the small room. D0 reported again their exciting results shown at ICHEP for the dimuon asymmetry, which rely on a clever cancellation of some of their background by combining the dimuon asymmetry with the single muon one. As reported by Jester, things are getting far less optimistic -- if you like New Physics -- for the phase in Bs mixing, since CDF agrees now with the SM, whereas D0 remains in muddy waters. Let us hope that both collaboration will provide an average very soon...

Fortunately, the other sessions were less overcrowded, but still quite lively. Belle has showed its ability to run nicely at the Υ(5S), yielding interesting results on some nonleptonic decays for the Bs mesons after analysing only 1/5 of its sample. This makes all the more interesting the prospects of a super-B factory and will probably renew our interest in old-fashionned (but still so reliable) studies on SU(3) and U-spin symmetries. On the lighter side of CKM, the KOTO experiment seems to be right on track, with a completion of the detector in 2011 to reach a sensitivy around 10^-9 on Br(K⁰->π⁰νν-bar) in 2012. Considering how well we understand this mode from the theoretical point of view in the Standard Model, this is excellent news. There were also preliminary results from MEG on μ to e conversion: a few events can be seen in the signal region -- still compatible with no signal at 90% CL (but the best fit result corresponding to 3 signal events, which makes you dream that maybe, with an increased statistics...).

I popped into other sessions to hear a few interesting talks, like the first results from LHCb (with the first measurements of b-bar production cross-section, as well as the first W and Z events), the not-so-surprising non-discovery of the Higgs at CDF/D0, and the related (and maybe underestimated) theoretical uncertainties on the channels used for this search. Unfortunately, our "presidential" change of schedule kept me quite busy out of the session rooms at the time of the new results on neutrinos and cosmic rays, but I have still the plenary talks to learn about them...

Let Part Two begin !