The Large Hadron Collider Physics (LHCP) is one of the largest conferences for high energy physics, hosted every year , focusing on results from CERN experiments. This yearly conference just had its 12th edition hosted here in Boston. Hundreds of physicists from around the world met at Northeastern University to present the recent results from the LHC and to discuss plans for future work.
Overall, the conference presented new results displaying the abilities of the experiments at CERN in pushing collider physics. Over 45 plenary talks and over 200 parallel talks were given, ranging from precision physics, beyond standard model physics, to future experiments. Many of the results surpassed original projections for Run 2 and Run 3 analyses and the conference highlighted the breadth of physics being actively pursued across the different experiments at the LHC.
The MIT PPC group had a big showing here as well, with talks given by both Chad Freer and Zhangqier Wang. Chad gave an overview of the Recent Dark Sector searches from CMS. In attendance of the talk was Matt Strassler, one of the minds behind Soft Unclustered Energy Patterns (SUEPs), which has recently been released and was presented at the talk. Qier gave an overview of Rare Decays at CMS and ATLAS. This talk focused on rare B decays and included angular analysis from CMS and measurement of the Bs —> μμ lifetime from ATLAS.
The conference also had a plentiful social program. The conference dinner was hosted by the Museum of Fine Arts (MFA). Attendees were given food with an open bar and allowed to enter a limited set of galleries freely. There was an additional excursion to the famous Fenway park, shown below, to see the Red Sox play. This night was a special event at Fenway with free shirts being passed out to fans as they entered the stadium. As always, the LHCP conference provided an opportunity for us to see all of the recent physics being done around the CERN, while catching up with friends and colleagues, all in our own backyard of Boston!
