The winter conference season is well under way, and what better way to fill my first blog post than with a report from one of the premier conferences in particle and astroparticle physics: the Rencontres de Moriond.

Having explored the latest results on what we call 'heavy flavour' or physics of particles containing a b-quark (see The Penguin Domination by Jessica Levêque), we embarked on a much lighter subject: neutrinos.

The past two days of the Recontres de Moriond 2014 Electroweak conference have been very intense with many new experimental results, many insightful theoretical talks and many lively discussions. Since the topics cover neutrino experiments, astrophysical observations and Standard Model precision measurements, giving a summary is not an easy task. But I will try.

This week features the 2014 Moriond Electroweak conference at La Thuile, Italy. More than a 100 particle physicists gather from all around the world. Started 50 years ago, this conference is still very valued, year after year, due to the high quality of the talks. The Moriond winter conference is one of the most exciting conferences, as all the particle physics experiments present their brand new results, but it is also appealing because of the mountains and the great Italian food.

I've been lucky to get to make two workshop / conference stops on a trip that started at the very beginning of October. The first was at Kinematic Variables for New Physics, hosted at Caltech. Now I'm up at the Computing in High Energy Physics conference in Amsterdam. Going to conferences and workshops is a big part of what we do, in order to explain our work to others and share what great things we're doing, in order to hear the latest on other people's work, and - and this one is important - in order to get to talk with colleagues about what we should do next.

Supersymmetry (SUSY) is one of the most loved, and most hated, theories around that works as an extension of our beloved Standard Model.

There's a (potentially) really big deal in physics that's just ended: the Snowmass conference. Ken over at the USLHC blog has already mentioned it, and I've been watching with interest from here in Geneva as well. The meeting, and its reports, are trying to walk an extrodinarily delicate line that's interesting for both the physics and the sociology involved.

After a long hiatus from US ATLAS, I recently started a new job at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratories. It's one of the few remaining labs in the US funded by the Department of Energy that does basic science research. It's the fourth job I've had in four years, all working on ATLAS, and all working on similar projects. This one is different, though: if I pass a performance review a few years from now, I'll have the lab-equivalent of tenure. I've had reactions ranging from "who did you have to kill to get that job" to "so who did you actually talk to to land that"?

A small scale version of the ATLAS detector can be made available as an official LEGO® product, but I need people to vote for it at LEGO Cuusoo. We need 10,000 votes to be considered by LEGO®.

The series of workshops named "Deep Inelastic Scattering (DIS)" started way back in Durham, UK in 1993. In the last twenty years, particle physics has evolved in many ways, and this years DIS held at Marseille between April 22-26th was a testament to that fact. While it was one of the biggest conference in terms of Standard Model physics talks from ATLAS, it included talks and latest results covering the full ATLAS (and other big LHC experiments) physics program.

"Moriond", that's an important keyword in our collaboration. It's the winter deadline for many analyses, the occasion to see first results with the whole set of data collected in the past year. An important conference, one of the milestones of the year.

Welcome back, dedicated top quark enthusiast. I’m sure you’ve all been waiting on the edge of your seats for an update from TOP 2012, and I can now confirm that a combined team of LHC & Tevatron physicists narrowly beat a mixed team of physicists from LHC & Tevatron at croquet.

Greetings from the TOP 2012 conference, Winchester UK! What’s a ‘Winchester’ I hear you asking? A type of gun? Indeed yes, though sadly not of the smoking variety that we’re all so keen to find. However in this particular case Winchester is a historical town in the south of England, complete with the typical rolling green fields, a cathedral, and the not so typical contingent of visiting physicists!

On the 4^th of July, CERN announced the discovery of a new particle that can be interpreted as the Higgs boson with both the ATLAS and CMS experiments. Since this is one of the most important discoveries over the last 10 or 20 years in particle physics, let’s have a look to the full story.

We have discovered a particle. It is perhaps the particle everybody has been looking for but, for now, let us just call it a particle possibly known as the Higgs.

Where to begin? The 4th of July, 2012 will remain burned in the memories of those of us fortunate to be delegates at this historic 36th International Conference on High Energy Physics (#ICHEP2012) in beautiful Melbourne, Australia.

Good morning science addicts and everyone! What a special day at CERN today! Indeed, the ATLAS and CMS experiments have just released some outstanding results and observations about the search for the Higgs boson, and the ATLAS and CMS spokespersons (Fabiola Gianotti, and Joe Incandela) just presented those results in the main auditorium at 9 a.m (CERN time).

The Large Hadron Collider commands many superlatives. One of the most useful of these is that the LHC is our planet's most powerful human-built microscope. The higher the collision energy, the tinier the distances you can study.

Inspired by Regina Caputo’s excellent post on the CERN accelerator complex, I thought I should give you some fun facts about the LHC (in “human units”).

The LHC is designed to collide bunches of protons every 25 ns, i.e., at a 40 MHz rate (40 million/second). In each of these collisions, something happens. Since there is no way we can collect data at this rate, we try to pick only the interesting events, which occur very infrequently; however, this is easier said than done. Experiments like ATLAS employ a very sophisticated filtering system to keep only those events that we are interested in. This is called the trigger system, and it works because the interesting events have unique signatures that can be used to distinguish them from the uninteresting ones.

(I'm not skipping day 2, about heavy flavors and my own talk, but I think today's topic merits a reshuffling)

I work with crazy particles. Dark matter is pretty weird, so are neutrinos seemingly, but what I search for blows it all away. Tuesday was the day of my presentation. The format for these young scientist presentations are 5 minutes and time for a single question afterwards. Trying to present a full picture of any analysis in that short a time is impossible; instead the idea is more like handing out a business card telling the audience what you work on in the hope that some will be interested and contact you informally afterwards.

Not many trips take you to all ends of the world in one day, but that was nevertheless how it felt after the first talks at Moriond. Sunday and Monday have mainly featured presentations on neutrino and dark matter physics. Many of these experiments are placed in remote regions or deep under ground.

As a young physicist not many conferences have the same mystical status as Rencontres de Moriond. This gathering of physicists from all areas of particle physics is one of most anticipated events of the year. More a gathering than a conference, Moriond started in 1966 and has inspired many similar events. Presentations, time for discussion and recreation is combined to inspire and foster collaboration and new ideas. Another element is the meeting between young and more experienced scientists. Nearly half of the talks are given by young participants below 35 like myself. I was invited by the ATLAS collaboration to present our latest results on a search for a type of long-lived particles that has meant a lot to me for the last two years.

This is continuing from the previous post, where I discussed how we convert data collected by ATLAS into usable objects. Here I explain the steps to get a Physics result. I can now use our data sample to prove/disprove the predictions of Supersymmetry (SUSY), string theory or what have you. What steps do I follow?