Blogging ICHEP 2010


A collective forum about the 35th edition of
the International Conference on High Energy Physics (Paris, July 2010)

Thursday, July 22, 2010

Hunting the Higgs in the Palais de Congres

Having just arrived at ICHEP, it's clear that it isn't just the media who have Higgs fever; the particle physicists have caught it too. The first session I attended focused on the performance of the LHC experiments with first data - it was well-attended, but there were plenty of empty seats. I'm now in the 16:15 Standard Model and Electroweak Symmetry Breaking session, and it's standing room only to hear the five Higgs talks; four of which are low-mass and high-mass Higgs search results from CDF and DZero.

Of course one could argue that the LHC presentations are being held in a larger room (the Salle Maillot, where the presentations are also being webcast), but I think that's only part of the story. Wandering around during the afternoon coffee break I couldn't help but overhear several conversations with a Higgs theme, and I suspect the Higgs also had quite a lot to do with the presence of a good number of journalists at the Palais de Congres during these first parallel sessions.

Can't wait to see what the presentations will reveal, this afternoon and over the next week - and how the physicists in attendance (including my fellow bloggers) will interpret them!

1 comment:

  1. During the coffee break I also heard that in the next days we might enjoy the presence of and important French politician :-) at the Conference. Maybe this could also partly explain the journalist presence: they might be scouting the location...

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