We have had three important events on the “Higgs front” in the past few days:
⁃ Our H→ττ paper (HIG-13-004) is now accepted for publication by JHEP
⁃ The last of the “legacy” analyses, H→γγ, has now entered CWR and is heading towards publication, in line with the publication plan set at the beginning of the year
⁃ The presentation of our Higgs width analysis from off-shell production in a well received LHC seminar at CERN on Apr. 15th.

We have also had the approvals of two important results on Beyond Standard Model (BSM) physics searches:
⁃ The search for heavy right-handed neutrinos (EXO-13-008) where a final state with a pair of jets coming from the WR accompanied by two leptons is looked for in both electrons and muons channels. Limits in the neutrino-WR plane set as well as for σ x BR. Right-handed W up to 3 TeV are excluded at 95% CL. A 2.5σ excess around 2.1 TeV in the electron channel only, is also observed.
⁃ The search for heavy resonances decaying to two higgses where final states with a pair of b-quarks and a pair of photons are selected. Many extradimension models predict the existence of such resonances with cross sections reachable at LHC. Using the Radion interpretation model, masses up to 0.97 TeV are excluded at 95% CL for a Radion scale ΛR=1 TeV.

The Heavy Ion group is rallying up for a complete new set of analyses to be presented at Quark Matter 2014. No less than 16 analyses are now foreseen to go for approval in time for the conference, even though the possibility to reach this result was not an easy ride. We faced a “re-reco” crisis a few weeks ago, when it became evident that with standard resources the reprocessing of the Heavy Ion data could not be completed in time. Once again, our computing flexibility and the dedication of a number of experts has allowed us to explore new workflows and inject new resources almost on-the-fly, up to the point of completing the processing in due time.

by Luca Malgeri