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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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The CDF collaboration has recently released new results from a search for what is probably the clearest signature of Higgs boson decay: pairs of high-mass photon candidates. I am very glad to see this new analysis out for publication, since so far only DZERO, CDF's competitor at the Tevatron, had produced results on this particular final state.
"We were not yet prepared to claim that we had found a new charged lepton, but we were ready to claim that we had found something new. To accentuate our uncertainty I denoted the new particle by U for unknown in some of our 1975-1977 papers. The name came later. This name was suggested by Rapidis, who was then a graduate student and had worked with me in the early 1970s on the problem. The letter is from the Greek for "third" -the third charged lepton".
One of the few physics measurements that the LHC experiments are already in the position of producing, with the week-worth of proton-proton collision data they have collected last December, is that of the Bose-Einstein intereference between identical bosons.
There are twenty-four elementary fermions in the standard model. Sure, they are arranged in a very tidy, symmetrical structure of three families of eight fermions (two leptons and six quarks), which is not too unpleasant to behold. And of course, if one is willing to forget the fact that the quantum-chromodynamical charge of quarks does make them different, then the picture is even tidier: 12 fermions, six of them quarks and six of them leptons, arranged in three families of four.
It has become a pleasant habit for me to visit Bassano del Grappa every February for a conference on particle physics aimed at high-school students. Thanks to the efforts and the skill of dr. Sergio Lucisano, the schools of Bassano organize every year several conferences on physics and cosmology. These conferences are connected with the european program of the Masterclasses, but they extend the scope considerably into the history of physics and other topics of interest for the students.
I remember very well the very first meeting of the Heavy Flavour Working Group in CDF that I attended in the summer of 1992. I was a summer student back then, and my understanding of spoken English was not perfect, so as a graduate student started discussing with his slides the results he was getting on the top quark mass reconstructed in simulated single-lepton top pair decays, I struggled to follow his talk -the physics was just as hard to follow as the English.