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Co-Design Of Scientific Experiments

Next Monday, or Tuesday at the latest, you will find a new bulky paper in the arXiv. Titled "On...

Travel With Two Infants

The other day I traveled with Kalliopi and our two newborns to Padova from Lulea. After six full...

A Nice Little Combination

Although I have long retired from serious chess tournaments (they take too much time, a luxury...

The Strange Case Of The Monotonous Running Average

These days I am putting the finishing touches on a hybrid algorithm that optimizes a system (a...

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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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WTF. A pleasant, unexpected surprise awaited me in the CMS Times, the online periodical which reports on the status of the CMS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider, the research activities, the people participating in the experiment.
The fact that I am swamped by the too many activities I am involved in these days can be gauged by things like the following: I get to know about important new physics results coming from an experiment I am part of by... private communications from amateurs! Knowledgeable and informed ones, of course -but that's not the point.
"CERN is a Lab of culinary splendor and architectural catastrophe and Fermilab is the other way around"

L. Lederman, "The God Particle"
If you love skateboarding and if you love Venice, and if you are curious to see how a skater can live there regardless of the cronic absence of sporting structures (no skate parks, no way), have a look at this short video, which shows a few skate tricks performed in the streets of downtown Venice.

You might wonder what does this have to do with particle physics and with my blog. Little, admittedly. But the tricks are in part made by my son Filippo, 12 years old. This is his first video on YouTube and he's getting excited by few tens of hits.... So I thought I'd give him a boost by pasting the link here.
The figure for you to guess which I posted two days ago is built with simulated events featuring the production, at the Tevatron collider, of a Z boson (decaying to electron-positron or muon-antimuon pairs) together with an energetic photon. Apart from Tulpoeid, who of course knew this since Z-gamma production was her PhD thesis topic, only one other reader posted here a solution close to the correct one.
The Upsilon suppression paper by CMS is now public, and you can find it here. I decided to put an entry here since several people asked me to access the information...

Note that this paper is a quite important publication, which not only deals with Y suppression, but more in general with a quantification of dimuon resonance yields. Happy reading!