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Drama at Opera

When your non-physicists friends start to send you links to big newspapers’ headlines reporting important physics results (usually titled ‘Einstein was wrong’: it’s been like that for almost a century now, it is apparently the best an average reporter can come up with) it means that something potentially important is happening. After days of rumors, the results of the Opera experiment have been finally released

http://arxiv.org/abs/1109.4897

and they are frankly bizarre. Ready? Neutrinos go faster than the speed of light! My first reaction is ‘this is too odd to be true’, and in fact the members of the Opera themselves are very cautious.Let’s wait and see whether other experiments confirm or disprove these findings.

GRAPPA – The new center of excellence of the U. of Amsterdam

GRAPPA (Gravitation and AstroParticle Physics Amsterdam) is the name of the new center of excellence of the University of Amsterdam. In an unprecedented effort, the University hired 4 new professors in 2011 (Shin’Ichiro Ando, Patrick Decowski, Ben Freivogel and myself) and two additional positions will be opened at the end of the year. There will be a kick-off meeting this Fall, stay tuned! 

ERC Starting Grant

The proposal “WIMPs Kairos – The Moment of Truth for WIMP dark matter” has been placed in the priority list by a panel of experts of the European Research Council, and it will be funded under the “ERC Starting Independent Researcher Grant” scheme. The scope of this line of research is described in the proposal’s incipit:

Identifying Dark Matter is a top priority in Particle Physics and Cosmology: we know it contributes 85% of all the matter in the Universe, and we know that it cannot be made of ordinary baryonic matter. What is it then? Among Dark Matter candidates, WIMPs (weakly interacting massive particles) occupy a special place, since they naturally arise from well motivated extensions of the standard model of particle physics, therefore providing an elegant explanation to the Dark Matter problem. With the advent of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, and of a new generation of astroparticle experiments, the moment of truth has come for WIMPs, for we will either discover them in the next 5 to 10 years, or we will inevitably witness the decline of the WIMP paradigm.

No WIMPs yet (and no HE neutrinos either)

There were big expectations for Xenon 100, a leading experiment in the race for the direct detection of Dark Matter. But the results announced today are somewhat disappointing, since the collaboration announced the detection of 3 events, while the expected background is of 1.8±0.6 events. (see also the discussion at Resonaances).
Should we panic? Not yet, in my opinion. As argued elsewhere, the best we can do is to stick to our plans, and see what ton-scale experiments (and the LHC) will tell us, before drawing our conclusions about WIMP Dark Matter.

New results of the neutrino telescope IceCube have also been published recently (see here and here). As the collaboration acknowledges: “The results from all searches are compatible with a fluctuation of the background”, which means that no point sources have been detected.