USCMS meetings are held yearly in the US rotating in some semi random way between the different US institutions that are involved in the CMS experiment. The most important factor is of course the willingness of the local group or PI to host the meeting. This year, Isobel Ojalvo, a junior faculty at Princeton signed up for this important and quite intense activity, thus the 2024 USCMS Meeting in Princeton. She worked with the USCMS board chair Robin Erbacher and deputy Sudhir Malik to organize a great meeting in the lovely town of Princeton in New Jersey. The venue was set in the Frick Chemistry Lab and Princeton’s own Peter Elmer worked as the photographer of the event.
One of the important action items was the presentation of the candidates for the chair and the deputy positions of the USCMS collaboration board. This year we heard presentations from Kevin Black (Wisconsin) and Eva Haliadakis (Rutgers) for the chair and only Sudhir Malik stood for re-election of the deputy position.
It was great to see a large number of presenations in particular from the young people in the collaboration and they are doing really well. Big topics where of course the upgrade and the hottest analyses. It looks like the excess (page 17,18)‘Higgs’ peak at 95 GeV, which CMS sees in diphoton and in the ditau decays is not really confirmed by ATLAS but it still stirs up some excitement. We need to be prepared for surprises.
From the MIT point of view, we have to push hard on the W boson mass and the followup precision electroweak measurements that will make a big difference in the perception of hadron collider physics for precision. The effective weak mixing angle presentation, an analysis long pursued by Arie Bodek, was given by Rhys Taus and showed how much has happened in the hadron collider community. The treatment of the PDF uncertainties is something we should synchronize with the W boson mass efforts.
The Dinner was held in the magical octagonal rotunda in the Chancellor Green. It was a wonderful night with colleagues, eating great food and having good conversations. Rumor has it that there was a plan for an ‘improvised’ Karaoke competition, but I cannot confirm because I left a little early. Clearly we should do this again, and I am thinking, we have never done this at MIT? Maybe 2025 is MIT ‘s turn …