New Planck results, another one bites the dust

After four years of operation of the Planck satellite of the European Space Agency (ESA), the Planck Collaboration has build up an exquisitely precise map of the sky in both temperature and now of polarisation. These maps furnish a detailed picture of how the universe evolved. Among the numerous results provided by the Planck satellite over the last year, there is an assessment of the polarised dust emission at intermediate and high Galactic latitudes  (http://arxiv.org/abs/1409.5738). This is a crucial foreground in the searches for primordial B-mode polarisation patterns, possibly imprinted in the Cosmic Microwave Background by gravitational waves of  inflationary origin, also known as tensor modes. Thanks to this measurement, older estimates of this contribution have  been revisited and, in a joint effort by the BICEP2/Keck Array and Planck Data collaborations (http://arxiv.org/abs/1502.00612),  no statistically significant evidence for tensor modes has been found in a reanalysis of the BICEP 2 observations, which  in 2014 had been interpreted as a possible primordial B-mode detection  (http://arxiv.org/abs/1403.3985), an interpretation that made big waves in the media then... undeservedly. We will need to wait and be more careful about gravity waves.

Group Theory Lectures 2015

Following the success of the course that Paul Sorba gave 2 years ago, our new PhD students and post docs asked Paul to renew the experience. The Group Theory and its Applications course is to be delivered over about 10 sittings.  The course will cover 

1) Elements of group theory and their importance in particle physics

2) Lie groups and Lie algebras

3) Classification of semi-simple Lie algebras

4) Representations of simple Lie algebras

5) Applications: spectroscopy of elementary particles, gauge theory, grand unification models

6) Extensions: superalgebras (for supersymmetry); quantum groups (for integrable systems); exceptional algebras and infinite dimensional algebras (for string theory)

Read more: Group Theory Lectures 2015

Jobs : PhD positions Enigmass 2015

The "Excellence Laboratory" ENIGMASS is offering up to 3 three-year PhD positions (doctoral fellowships) starting autumn 2015 in Annecy and Grenoble.

The list of proposed PhD subjects is here. Applicants should have a Master-2 diploma (or equivalent) by the end of July 2015.

The application deadline is February 16th 2015 (23:59 CET).

 Applicants should fill the application form available here. The results will be available by the beginning of May 2015.

Anonio Pich Lectures : Naturalness and LHC Run 2

As part of the ENIGMASS lecture series, Antonio Pich (University of Valencia, Spain) delivered a series of lectures on 12/13 November (2014) entitled " Probing Naturalness and Electroweak Symmetry Breaking at LHC run-2.  Three lectures of 1h30 each were given, each lecture was followed by a debate and exchange with the audience. The target audience were staff physicists, post-docs and PhD students. For more details about the events see here.

Lecture 1 Lecture 2 Lecture 3