That's really a wonderful and exciting experience as a theoretical physicist! This is such a nice read, I was able to understand the concepts I was about to research on when I read your PRD paper (especially on the use of the illustration in explaining the seesaw mechanism). You should also consider compiling all these blogs and write a book, you're a very engaging writer. :)
Hope you get back soon to the healthier you (before getting Covid), I know some people who tried doing cardio exercises to get back their stamina. But also, rest is such a great investment too.
Here's a question I've got, what will be the implication of the observation of the CMS collaboration on the future work at the LHC? Since the prediction and observed data shows that the heavy neutrino is beyond the energy of the LHC?
Hmm I am not very sure about this. Somewhat, I should need to find a story line connecting 'smoothly' all my blogs, which is not always easy as the topics covered are quite different. And this story line needs to be attractive so that people could have fun to follow from A to Z. This is where I am for now not 100% sure.
Anyway, I will keep it in mind, maybe for the future. Also, I need to consider the time it will take to write such a book. As a side note, I already have two physics books published (in French, although one of them is currently being translated to English; we are ion negotiations with publishers).
For now, they have not observed any signal, so that constraints on the model are put. However, only a small fraction of the parameter space is excluded (what lies above the solid black line in the CMS plot), so that there is still a long way to go before we could say that we throw seesaw models to the bin. In other words, there is this still a lot of space for future searches to contribute.
On the other hand, the mass of the heavy neutrino is a free parameter of the model. It could be light (the left part of the plot, more constrained) or heavy (the right part of the plot). The nice feature/strength of the search that I discuss is that it allows us to probe configurations in which the mass of the neutrino is larger than the energy of the LHC, as well as configurations when it is small.
However, as can be seen from the results, the search only probes configuration where the mixing between the heavy neutrino and the Standard Model neutrinos is (very) large. There are thus still a lot of non-probed setups, that we must cover in the future in one way or the other.
Does it answer your question?
PS: the fatigue does not want to leave, unfortunately :(
Ah yeah, you're right, book writing and editing takes a lot of time and effort since it's a 'packaged' of discussions of a general topic.
Oh, this is great news. I actually started learning French 2 years ago, on the first months of the pandemic. But I'm still in the beginner's level. Haha. I'd just patiently wait for the translation of one of your books since I haven't even finished reading the book Le Petit Prince. 😅
There really are still so many things to explore! Somehow, it made me more excited knowing that there's still a lot of work needed to be done, as you have mentioned that this is also what we aim in the #citizenscience project.
As a side note, I discussed your suggestion with my wife, and she agrees with you. I should extract a book out of my blogs. I am still very unsure about this, and that's definitely too much work at the moment so that there is no reason to even ask the question ;). It is however well noted.
I will let you know when this translation will be finalised. It is a primer on quantum mechanics (so definitely too hard in French for someone not mastering the language).
I am late on this one. I should start finalising the next episode... But the end of the year is tough, as any end of the year ;)
Cheers!
Yay, another thing to look forward to in the future! :)
It's fine, slow progress is still progress. It's not good that the project will be overwhelming the participants and that includes you as our professor 😃
Thanks for these nice words :)