If you’re part of the particle physics community, there’s a good chance that a lot of your attention the past week or so has been in ICHEP – the International Conference on High Energy Physics, which just concluded this week in Chicago.

Of course, the biggest story-line going into the conference was the famed diphoton excess around ~750 GeV, observed by both ATLAS and CMS last year. The excess was first noted near the end of last year, and it had been a foregone conclusion for months that ICHEP would be the site of the last word on the bump. In case you haven’t heard – the excess has disappeared with more data. This was a big bummer for a huge portion of the community – the bump was one of the surest signs of beyond the standard model physics in quite awhile (aside from neutrino oscillations), and it prompted hundreds and hundreds of theory papers being published to try and explain it. Plenty of others have covered this in detail, so I don’t want to go into it too much – for some particularly good summaries, check out Matt Buckley’s series for the Boston Review, or Natalie Wolchover’s article for Quanta Magazine.

Despite the disappointment, there are some definite positives coming out of the conference. I’ll save the Cosmology/Dark Matter related topics for a later post and for now focus on a couple things that captured my interest from the LHC side. (Unfortunately, I wasn’t at the conference itself, and they didn’t live stream any of the talks, so my following was largely through twitter and other official releases from collaborations like ATLAS and CMS).

One thing I was paying a lot of attention to was the supersymmetry (susy) searches – ATLAS has a nice briefing here. The briefing linked above summarizes a number of searches for the final states of susy particles decaying into detectable channels, separated by whether those final states include zero, one, two, or three light leptons (an electron or a muon), or a tau lepton. These results were combined to set new limits on the minimum mass the top squark could have, if it exists. (All of this is assuming “vanilla” supersymmetry – more details some other time). For the most part, the new data is consistent with there being nothing beyond the standard model. The search for top squark (the supersymmetric partner of the top quark) final states with one isolated lepton however, yielded a somewhat intriguing excess of 3.3 sigma in one of the signal selections. As the briefing notes though, if you look in a bunch of different channels, there’s a decent chance that in one of them, you’ll see some kind of statistical excess. So, while this isn’t anything to get too excited about for now, it’s certainly an interesting channel to keep an eye on.

The susy searches are typically combined to produce lower limits on the mass of the hypothetical susy particles. Also interestingly, a number of the limits came back a lot lower than expected, given the amount of data collected. See one of CMS’s exclusion plots here, for example. Again, this is likely just a statistical fluctuation, but also something to keep an eye on as the LHC continues collecting more and more data.

In short, as Pauline Gagnon noted in the Quantum Diaries blog, “Many small steps, but no giant leap”