High Energy Physics Party Aftermath: The God Particle Must Be Around Here Somewhere

The world's top physicists spent the past week in Grenoble getting theoretically and experimentally drunk on all things sub-atomic at the 2011 Europhysics Conference on High Energy Physics.

The symposium came at a pivotal moment. It was the first major gathering of the global physics community since beam smashing at CERN's Large Hadron Collider reached 7 TeV (teraelectronvolts).

"So far we've collected as much data as was planned for the whole of 2011," CERN Director General Rolf Heuer said in press release, "and that's already a great achievement for the LHC." It also came in the waning days of Fermilab's Tevatron collider, due up to power down this fall.

What's that? You didn't make it? Here are some highlights:

• We're (still) getting closer! Scientists collaborating on Fermilab's CDF and DZero experiments have furthered narrowed the allowed mass range of the Higgs particle. Researchers contend the elusive Higgs mechanism, believed to endow matter with mass, won't be hiding in either the 100-108 and 156-177 GeV/c^2 mass ranges. Their results build off Fermilab's already significant tightening of the Higgs range, and are confirmed by similar results out of CERN's ATLAS and CMS experiments.

• See ya, SUSY? ATLAS results ruled out the possibility of squarks (superpartners of quarks) and gluinos (hypothetical supersymmetric parterns of gluons) existing below 1 TeV. Not Even Wrong blog notes how "significantly more than half of the region in which supersymmetry was supposed to appear" is ruled out when comparing the new ATLAS regions to those pre-LHC regions "considered most likely." SUSY, or supersymmetry, is a theoretical symmetry pairing elementary, one-spin particles with superpartners, or those differing by a half unit of spin.

• Does anything matter anymore!?! Researchers on MINOS, Fermilab's massive underground detector that's hunting those notoriously skittish neutrinos, presented findings of possible transformations of muon neutrinos into electron neutrinos. If muon neutrinos do in fact morph into electron neutrinos, neutrinos could've been behind the creation of more matter than antimatter at the Big Bang. The MINOS results confined a prior measurement of the Japanese T2K experiment.

No word yet on whether the Racing Electrons or the Racing Neutrinos proved victorious in Tuesday night's conclusion to the HEP soccer tournament. Stand by for your god particle.