What's in store in 2013

When you think about it, the end of the world in 2012 would have made perfect sense. Last year we found the Higgs boson -- the last of the particles predicted by the standard model. It may well be that humans have already discovered all elementary particles, in which case all that's left is looking in the sixth place of decimals. Alas, the armageddon didn't happen, so we have to drag on. What will the year 2013 bring to particle physicists?

Well, this year is surely going to be depressing because the LHC will come to a long halt, after a brief period of shit-on-shit collisions in January and February*. During the next 2 years the machine will undergo necessary repairs upgrades so that it can restart with the collision energy of about 13 TeV. Nevertheless this year should be entertaining, as the analyses of the full 8 TeV dataset will be flowing in. First of all, we're waiting for the Higgs update expected around the time of the  Moriond conference in March. The most important question is whether the measured rate in the diphoton decay channel  will continue to show an excess over the standard model, as currently hinted by ATLAS, or whether it will drift towards the standard model value, as hinted by CMS. Other Higgs search channels are unlikely to show a major departure from the standard model, given the existing data... but one never knows.  Besides, there will be of course hundreds of new physics searches; as long as there is data there's hope  that a new exciting phenomenon  may pop up somewhere...    

On the other side of the Atlantic two important experiments will kick off in 2013. Between Fermilab and Minnesota, the NOvA neutrino experiment will carry the first attack on the CP violating phase in the neutrino mixing matrix. Over in South Dakota, the LUX dark matter experiment will join Xenon100 on the frontier of WIMP detection.  However, neither of the above is likely to deliver anything groundbreaking as early as this year.

What else? When times are tough  we turn our eyes to heaven. The Planck satellite, that has performed precise measurements of the Cosmic Microwave Background, will release the cosmological results in March. Disappointingly, the release will not include the CMB polarization data, which are supposed the meat of the whole mission. Nevertheless, the new CMB temperature maps should give us a better grip on cosmological parameters and improve on what we learnt from WMAP. Elsewhere in the sky the AMS-02 experiment,  glued to the International Space Station since 1 and half year now, is supposed to release first results this year. Although we don't expect anything spectacular, a confirmation of the positron excess claimed a few years ago by the PAMELA satellite would already be something. Back to the Earth, an upgraded version of the HESS gamma-ray telescope has been operating in Namibia since last summer. The previous HESS data has been used to put limits on the monochromatic gamma-ray emission from the galactic center at very high energies, 0.5-25 TeV. According to some reports, HESS-II should be able to go down in energy and quickly refute the presence of the line at 135 GeV that seems to be present in the data from the  Fermi gamma-ray satellite.

So, the new year holds some promises, although it's unlikely to match the fabulous 2012. Actually, I'm already worried about 2014, when there'll be so little new data.  Most likely, Résonaances will then  have to turn into a tabloid blog publishing topless pictures of physicists on Caribbean beaches.  But let's not think about that for a moment, and let's enjoy 2013 with the avalanche of LHC data soon to be released. 

*) As correctly pointed out by a commenter, this year we'll have proton-on-shit rather than shit-on-shit collisions. Apologies for the inaccuracy.