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Tommaso DorigoRSS Feed of this column.

Tommaso Dorigo is an experimental particle physicist, who works for the INFN at the University of Padova, and collaborates with the CMS and the SWGO experiments. He is the president of the Read More »

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Am following the Neutrino Telescope conference in Venice, which started yesterday in the beautiful setting of Palazzo Franchetti. For once I am quite happy to walk to work -different from the usual hour-and-something commute to Padova, where I have my office in the Physics Department. But I am not idle: I have been producing reports of all the talks at the conference, in the conference blog site.

Here is a list of pointers to the talk reports:

- A Tribute to Milla Baldo Ceolin

- Carlo Rubbia: A Millimole of Muons for a Higgs Factory
For the series "ideas worth spreading", CMS has copied the nice idea of ATLAS of producing an animated gif with increasing data leading to the Higgs boson discovery.

This is the mass distribution of Higgs boson candidates, detected by collecting events featuring four charged leptons (electrons or muons). The leptons are combined in pairs, and one pair (of same flavour) will usually yield a mass in the ballpark of the Z boson mass; the other pair will have lower energy if it is produced by an off-shell Z boson. Of course all four-lepton pairs compatible with quality criteria are kept, and the mass distribution thus contains a majority of events due to standard model production of ZZ pairs. This is the peaking background at masses above 180 GeV.
Carlo Rubbia discussed the prospects of constructing a muon collider to produce large amounts of Higgs bosons and study their properties in detail, crucially measuring the natural width of the particle, and testing couplings to a precision that LHC can't arrive at, to verify whether the particle is the Standard Model Higgs or if there are anomalies. The talk is discussed in detail in this report.

Here I just recall a question I asked Rubbia after the talk:
A short note to mention that starting today, and until Friday, I will be blogging from the "Neutrino Telescopes" conference in Venice. This is a conference dedicated to the study of neutrinos, and will feature many interesting talks on high-energy physics and astrophysics. I will paste here some of the material, but if you are interested in the topic you should check out the blog site of the conference, http://neutel11.wordpress.com/
The LHCb collaboration published on the Cornell Arxiv yesterday a preprint describing the observation of a rare decay of the B_c meson. In this landscape of failed SUSY searches,  no-shows of new resonances in dilepton mass spectra, flat dijet mass histograms, and a general gloomy feeling that the Higgs is all we'll get this decade at the high-energy frontier, it is nice to turn to the beautiful little jewels that are still there to be unearthed in heavy meson spectroscopy.
Now that the first of the Moriond conferences is over, and just as the second one starts, it is time to have a detached view at the Higgs boson results presented there this far by the CMS and ATLAS collaborations, to summarize where we stand and what new information we have gained since last fall, when some new results appeared for the HCP conference.