On the evening of October 1st. 2014, the UMass ATLAS group presented the acclaimed documentary film “Particle Fever” at the local cinema, Amherst Cinema. A packed audience (sold out 24 hours prior to the showing) followed a group of theorists and experimentalists on the ATLAS experiment as they passed from the early days of the start-up of the LHC to the climactic announcement, on 4 July 2012, of the discovery of the long-sought Higgs boson. Profs. Brau, Dallapiccola and Willocq, joined by special guest Nobel Laureate Prof. Sheldon Glashow, led a 45-minute Q&A session after the film. The audience asked a number of great questions! Details of the Q&A, here

Video clip highlights from the Q&A:

• What do you think of the multiverse concept? Glashow responds unequivocally that, being untestable, non-falsifiable and motivated by anthropic arguments, it is not good science. Other prominent physicists would disagree (a panel of physicists hotly debate the topic here). What do you think?
• What are your thoughts on the Nobel Prize awarded to Higgs and Englert, for discovery of the mechanism responsible for electroweak symmetry breaking? Should the experimental collaborations at CERN, ATLAS and CMS, have been awarded the prize for having made the discovery of the Higgs boson? Video here.

An update of the search for production of micro black hole states at the LHC, the focus of research efforts of Prof. Dallapiccola, postdoc Dan Ventura and graduate students German Colon and Nathan Bernard, has been published in the Journal of High Energy Physics: arxiv.org/abs/1405.4254. The 2012 data were scrutinized for telltale signs of black hole evaporation via Hawking radiation.  No evidence of a signal was present, and thus lower limits were placed, in the context of models of extra spatial dimensions, on the fundamental energy scale of gravity, M_D, and the energy threshold above which semi-classical black hole states could be produced, M_th.  Based on 20.3 fb^-1 of integrated luminosity collected in proton-proton collisions with the ATLAS detector, values of M_th < 4.8-6.2 TeV have been ruled out at 95% confidence level.  These new results place the most stringent constraints to date on models proposing large, compactified extra dimensions.

A search for production of mini black hole states at the LHC, the focus of research efforts of Prof. Dallapiccola and graduate student German Colon, has been submitted to Physics Letters B: arxiv.org/abs/1204.4646. The data were scrutinized for telltale signs of black holes decaying via Hawking radiation.  No evidence of a signal was present, and thus lower limits were placed on the fundamental energy scale of gravity, M_D, and the energy threshold above which classical black states could be produced, M_thresh.  Based on 1 fb^-1 of integrated luminosity collected in proton-proton collisions with the ATLAS detector, values of M_D < 1.5 TeV and M_thresh < 4.5 TeV have been ruled out at 95% confidence level.  These new results place stringent constraints on models proposing large, compactified extra dimensions.

These results, along with other, related searches for signatures of extra dimensions, were presented by Prof. Dallapiccola at a Fermilab JETP seminar, 11 May 2012, and can be viewed here.