The University of Pisa recently hosted the electroweak (EWK) physics community for a highly engaging week of presentations, discussions, hackathon sessions, and of course a little fun as well. Much of the PPC cohort was present, a nice excuse to get together, but also making it even more a very scientifically productive few days for us.
The first half of the week was an open symposium on the W boson mass — one might say a “catch-up”
following the recent landmark result from CMS. Colleagues from the other LHC experiments as well as theorists were able to discuss their current projects, future directions, and spawn new efforts and collaboration between theory and experiment, as well as across experiments. There were presentations from CMS, ATLAS, LHCb, and CDF, on the respective experimental efforts that lead to mW results, with a focus on the future. Focus then shifted to theory talks, where we heard about the development of cutting-edge techniques for higher-order event generators for precision EWK physics, handling uncertainties for missing orders, mixed QCD-EWK coefficients in precision Drell-Yan measurements, and more. Discussion was ample and particularly interesting from the experimentalist’s perspective to see what theory modeling and uncertainties are being investigated and improved by our theory counterparts. A sneak peek toward the future — Christoph also began some planning for the next EWK physics workshop to be held at Fermilab, so look out for that!
In the second part of the week, we shifted to the closed CMS Precision EWK Workshop, to focus on and organize internal efforts. The PPC in particular made up for six presentations: Jan on the low pile-up mW effort with the low pile-up data taking finally here; Jorian on the Lorentz invariance analysis; Pietro on new channels to improve calibration for an mZ measurement; and David with three!–an ultimate mZ measurement, a tutorial on the Rabbit fitting framework, and unfolding W and Z distributions. As the improvements to calibration, theory modeling, and so on, are beneficial to many of the ongoing EWK analyses, discussions about timelines and publication strategies were had to ensure that the outgoing analysis from CMS are the best results possible and take advantage of all the hard work going into these efforts.
Of course, the PPC also found time to explore Pisa, from the leaning tower, to history museums, to lots of good food and drinks. Orzo Bruno was a particular favorite, where we found ourselves at the end of most nights for drinks outdoors, and lots of discussion on physics and more!
Overall the workshop was a great success, getting together to know each other better in person is always a huge boost in terms of productivity and ability to work with one another, as well as makes the journey evermore enjoyable! We thank the University of Pisa for putting on a great week, and look forward to the next EWK physics workshop this summer at Fermilab. Until then, some time to work on and develop our many ongoing analyses, and push for more great results!
Bonus photos:
