ICHEP 2012 – Higgs Session

As you may have seen from our live-blogging of the CERN seminars on Wednesday morning, after having told Sean and John I would be asleep, I woke up anyway and watched the announcement live at 3am my time. I don’t regret it for a moment – you don’t get to watch historic events like that every day! But the reason I’d originally intended to stay asleep was that I had a very long day ahead of me, since Wednesday evening I flew out to Melbourne to take part in the 36th International Conference on High Energy Physics (ICHEP). This is the major high-energy physics conference every two years; and this year, given the Higgs announcement, it is particularly exciting.
I landed in Melbourne on Friday morning (local time), but couldn’t attend a lot of the conference that day because I had to deal with a lost bag (thanks United!) and then shop for a shirt, underwear, etc. Enough about that though. For the last year or so the University of Melbourne has been the primary institution in a new Australian Center of Excellence in Particle Physics (CoEPP) at the Terascale, and I am fortunate to be one of their international ...