Season’s greetings: particles are back around here!

It is quite a while I did not had the chance to write anything from my Steem account, and I mostly stopped interacting on the SteemSTEM Discord for the last three months. But I am still around! There is no way to get rid of me so easily…

During all this time, I was mostly focused on research, as well as on teaching and stuff related to the heavy strikes currently on-going in France. I hence had almost no time left for anything outside my job (and my family for the few free moments I had).

But things are starting to change… It is a new year after all!

I would like to make use of some of the time I currently have to pass by and send some season’s greetings for the beginning of this new decade :)

^{[image credits: Linnaea Mallette]}

While I was being away, I contributed only to few Steem-related activities, i.e. a few (but really a few, @mobbs will confirm) things in the background for SteemSTEM and that’s it. Among all my trips since last October (China, Korea, India, California, Quebec), I however had the chance to meet @dexterdev in person last November, when I gave a couple of lectures in his institute. This was really a great encounter! (I am always happy to meet Steemians in person… who’s next?)

So what about my close future on Steem?

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All about research!

I will first try to resurrect my personal blog!

On the research side, I managed to release 5 scientific contributions during my absence (I was not absent for nothing after all).

As teasers for the subjects of my next posts, please find below a two-sentences summary for each of those, which are excellent topics to populate my blog with fresh content, at least as soon as I will find the time to write.

Please stay tuned! In the meantime, here is the list.

• In a [first article](https://www.arxiv.org/abs/arXiv:1910.11418) that appeared in October, we discussed how to exploit the results of current LHC searches for new phenomena to get naive estimate on the sensitivity of the future updates of those searches. In other words, how the present can tell us about what the future will be able to do.


• With other collaborators, we wrote a [short proceedings contribution](https://www.arxiv.org/abs/arXiv:1910.11418), also in October, about top-philic dark matter, a topic that I have already largely covered on Steem back in the days. In those models, dark matter is connected to the Standard Model of particle physics through interactions with the heaviest of all known particles, the top quark.


• With another set of collaborators, we have studied a theory in which the interactions of the Standard Model are unified. This gives right to an extra fundamental interaction (**i.e.** a new force) and a dark matter particle called a scotino (yes this is a thing) with funny and amazing properties. The publication has been released in a [preprint](https://arxiv.org/abs/1911.12883) that appeared last November.


• Right before Christmas, with again other collaborators, we covered in [this preprint](https://arxiv.org/abs/1912.08975) predictions for the production of pairs of electrically-charged Higgs bosons. We revisited claims made in the past, released results of calculations that have never been done before and solved some ambiguities that appeared in the literature a few years ago.


• Finally, just before new year, I contributed to [an article](https://arxiv.org/abs/1912.13466) aiming at charting what could be the future of CERN. Equivalently, this describe what particle physicists could work on during the 50-60 years following the end of the LHC. Again, this consists in a topic I covered a lot on Steem in the past.

If you did not get everything, do not hesitate to ask specific questions in the comments. You can also wait for the 5 corresponding posts that I will write… but I cannot tell when. I wish I could be as active on Steem as in physics. ;)

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Back with SteemSTEM

In the next few days, I will try to come back to the development the steemstem.io.

There are a few things that I started 3 months ago and that are still not finalised. Not much is missing…

I would also like to start tackling my development plans for redesigning the app as @mobbs proposed a few months ago.

Yes @mobbs I am getting there. This is a promise.

On the curation side, I will again contribute to both curation and its management, taking care in particular of our distilled series again, the last episode having been released on Nov 28th last year. Shame on me I know :D

All in all, we will see what I will realistically be able to do. I will still be quite busy with physics for the next few weeks, as I have in particular a few trips (Korea, South Africa) on the plate and two more scientific articles to be written, about a unified framework to study dark matter and leptoquarks, respectively. Again, two potential hot topics for my blog ;)

I hope to see some sunshine at the horizon soon, if I can transcript my thoughts like that :)

That’s all for now! More from me (either on the SteemSTEM side or with a fresh particle physics Steem posts).

^{PS: This article has been formatted for the steemstem.io front-end. Please see here for a better reading.}