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Turning 60

Strange how time goes by. And strange I would say that, since I know time does not flow, it is...

On The Illusion Of Time And The Strange Economy Of Existence

I recently listened again to Richard Feynman explaining why the flowing of time is probably an...

RIP - Hans Jensen

Today I was saddened to hear of the passing of Hans Jensen, a physicist and former colleague in...

2026 Plans

This year opened in slow motion for me, at least work-wise. I have been on parental leave since...

Tommaso Dorigo

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 »

Jupiter And Saturn Put Up Quite A Show

Dec 19 2020 | comment(s)

In what is a once-in-a-few-lifetimes experience, I witnessed today the conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn in the evening sky (with a crescent moon thrown in to boot). While every sixteen years or so the two planets end up angularly close because of their different orbital period (Jupiter revolves around our Sun in 11.9 years, Saturn takes 29.4 years), small differences in their orbital planes make the smallest distance they reach usually of the order a degree.

The Geminid Meteor Shower Is As Strong As Ever

Dec 16 2020 | comment(s)

Meteor showers are a spectacular phenomenon that takes place when the Earth intersects the path along which periodic comets (or less frequently, asteroidal bodies) orbit the Sun. Comets lose debris when they get close to perihelion, but the debris does not get lost in all directions - it continues to follow the comet's path in the solar system.

Could We See LHC Neutrinos In IceCube? The Answer, As Always, Is Five Sigma

Dec 10 2020 | comment(s)

For the (likely going to be dramatically unsuccessful) series "Questions you would have liked your son asked you when you visited CERN together", I feature today a rather unconventional curiosity about LHC and neutrino physics. The source of inspiration for this is a coffee-time conversation I had long ago, I don't even remember with whom - probably a colleague. Anyway, that's the least interesting bit of the whole matter.

The LHC is...

What Is A LHC Signal More Cool Than The Higgs? Two Higgses

Nov 30 2020 | comment(s)

That's right - I finally hit the ground with my creativity, and my jokes are starting to use old material for my post titles. Yet producing a pair of Higgs bosons in a proton-proton collision is seriously cool indeed. The Higgs boson in fact is one of the few particles that does a trick called "self-coupling": in a sort of ermaphroditic act it is capable of giving birth to a pair of objects identical to itself.

Lunar Occultations, And Why They Are Fun

Nov 22 2020 | comment(s)

Have you ever looked at the moon through a telescope, or even a pair of binoculars? Our satellite is really beautiful to look at - it is full of detail you can get lost in: craters, mountain ridges, canyons, plateaus. And there's no clouds to obscure the view (if you are a planetary observer and you put an eye on Mars a couple of years ago you know what I mean - a dust storm that went on for weeks completely hid the surface from outside observers).

Is A Z' Signal Hiding In ATLAS TtH Data?

Nov 14 2020 | comment(s)

I was blissfully unaware until today of a slightly anomalous effect, which was found by the ATLAS Collaboration when performing a search for top pairs plus Higgs bosons in their Run 2 data. The anomaly I am talking about is an apparent excess of events which could be explained, as ATLAS did in this preprint article, by dialing up the cross section of some background processes producing a top pair and a W boson.