Triggers and Litmus Tests For BSM Physics Papers

[ohwilleke]

There are scores of new papers proposing or discussing new Beyond the Standard Model physics theories every week (at arXiv and elsewhere) and unless you have an infinite amount of time you can't read them all in depth.

What "triggers and litmus tests" do you rely upon to identify, either papers that look promising on one hand, or papers that aren't worth your time to pursue, on the other?

For example, I pretty much immediately ignore any paper that relies on tachyons to explain something.

On the other hand, I pretty much automatically follow up on any paper that claims to show an experimental result with a deviation from the SM or GR of 2.5 sigma or more (unless it calculates a look elsewhere effect of less than 2 sigma).

I also ignore pretty much all papers about how a newly proposed experiment would discover something if it were ever conducted (which really deserves its own category, for what it is worth).

 

[Fra]

There are scores of new papers proposing or discussing new Beyond the Standard Model physics theories every week (at arXiv and elsewhere) and unless you have an infinite amount of time you can't read them all in depth.

What "triggers and litmus tests" do you rely upon to identify, either papers that look promising on one hand, or papers that aren't worth your time to pursue, on the other?

For example, I pretty much immediately ignore any paper that relies on tachyons to explain something.

On the other hand, I pretty much automatically follow up on any paper that claims to show an experimental result with a deviation from the SM or GR of 2.5 sigma or more (unless it calculates a look elsewhere effect of less than 2 sigma).

I also ignore pretty much all papers about how a newly proposed experiment would discover something if it were ever conducted (which really deserves its own category, for what it is worth).

Indeed there isn't time to read everything.

1) Technical details within BSM programs that i consider misguided in its foundations is normally not interesting.

2) Claims of new key ideas that promises to resolve problems in the foundations of an otherwise (from my perspective) misguided programs catch my attention.

3) Technical details along the lines that are soundly founded do attract my attention. This category is what attracts most of my attention. Typically for me this is bayesian style information and inference based approaches to interactions.

4) New crazy theories that seem deeply confused or (from my perspective) misguided from the point of view of rational reasoning will not get attention.

/Fredrik