The most important particle physics conference this year, ICHEP 2024 in Prague, was coined the conference of ‘Disappearing Anomalies’ by one of my esteemed colleagues when I asked him on the last day what he found most remarkable about this conference. While I did not have a characterization like that in mind I had to agree that the disappearance of the discrepancies in B physics with LHCb and the slow fading of the g-2 discrepancy, combined with the less obvious excesses at the other LHC experiments did make the case for such a name. Interesting enough in 2020 there was an article published about the ‘era of anomalies’ we have entered, and indeed it seems they are temporary and sadly, normality is back.
Prague is set on the Vlatava river—confused me as a German a lot because it is called ‘Moldau’ in German—and is one of the most beautiful cities in Europe, with its historic architecture and sites, and it is also very affordable to live in. The conference had about 1400 participants mostly on site and was very professionally organized. Our group, the PPC at MIT, had planned to send the fresh W boson mass measurement to this conference but in the months before the conference schedule contingencies melted like snow in the summer sun and eventually we had to give up on the plan to make it to this conference. For an analysis that is more than ten years in the making it did not make sense to press too hard and risk mistakes or unhappiness in the collaboration. We will come out soon, though!
We did though have a number of results that were presented maybe most notably our new search for the rare decay of D0 to dimuons, which resulted in a world best limit. This rare decay is an ideal place to look for new physics contribution as the decay is at lowest order prohibited in the standard model and very clean; we are making use of the D* reconstruction technique which eliminates a lot of background and remains rather efficient. This search has been firmly in LHCb’s court until this result which surprised a number of colleagues at the conference. It was also highlighted in the Quark Flavor Physics summary of the conference (page 30).
