# Neutrinos (for Brits only)

Apr 14 2011 | 1 comment(s)

This morning this programme (45 minutes) was on BBC Radio 4.

In Our Time: the Neutrino

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0106tjc0

Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss the neutrino.

with:

Frank Close, Professor of Physics at Exeter College at the University of Oxford

Susan Cartwright, Senior Lecturer in Particle Physics and

# Natalie Heracleous on CMS Times

Apr 13 2011 | 3 comment(s)

A short post today, to mention the latest issue of the CMS Times, a online publication with news from the CMS experiment at CERN's Large Hadron Collider. The CMS Times is always informative and a good resource, but I usually forget to check it due to chronic shortage of CMS time in my agenda.

# White Dwarfs, Neutrons And Neutrinos

Apr 13 2011 | 5 comment(s)

### White Dwarfs

Fancy a trip to Sirius?  This is what you might see as you are approaching your destination.

For the unpopular cutting edge, there is no book with the answers at the back. This post will need to suffice for the snarky puzzles at the end of my previous posts. I am a playful snark, not a caustic one. I used to teach retarded citizens how to add. [clarification: while paying for 1 year of math grad school in Bloomington, Indiana, I volunteered an hour a week for a year at a local center.] I am that patient with myself, and will be so with you. Physics discussions can devolve into that 6 year-old boy fighting kind of groove (hi Sascha!). Since this is research, we do have a chance to learn something new together.
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# A Short Story Of Dijet Resonances

Apr 11 2011 | 20 comment(s)

In the comments thread of one of the posts I wrote recently, where I discussed the new tentative signal of a new jet-decaying particle discovered by the CDF collaboration in their data, a reader asked me if hadronic signals of single vector bosons had been seen before by CDF.

# The Jet Energy Scale As An Explanation Of The CDF Signal

Apr 07 2011 | 31 comment(s)

In my post about the new CDF signal of a mysterious new resonance decaying to jet pairs, there is an active comments thread. I posted there a graph crafted by Tommaso Tabarelli de Fatis, a CMS collaborator, who picked the CDF data and simulation and scaled the energy scale of the latter up by a few percent, showing that the agreement of simulation and data was better, and that the bump at 145 GeV could be explained away this way. Below you can see the result of scaling the jet energy scale up by 4% (the jet energy scale is bumped up by just scaling the dijet mass; this is in principle approximate, but it is a good one at that).

# More Thoughts On The New CDF Signal

Apr 07 2011 | 7 comment(s)

Given the wide interest (about 20k readers in a day) that the new article by the CDF collaboration has attracted (see my original post here), I think I should collect in a separate post some auxiliary information, concerning past searches which might have been sensitive to such a signal in the past.

# Is That A New Massive Particle ? Is That Some Kind Of Higgs ?

Apr 06 2011 | 66 comment(s)

UPDATE (4/7): I posted a link to a nice animated GIF which shows the (approximate) effect of scaling up the MC/data jet energy scale factor on the CDF new particle signal. See here.

UPDATE (4/7):
I added some considerations on the tentative CDF signal in a separate post today (4/7). You can find there a comparison with older semileptonic diboson searches at CDF and DZERO.

# No Mysterious Symmetry In Ultracold Helium Nanodroplet Science

Apr 05 2011 | 0 comment(s)

Mysterious Symmetry between Destruction and Growth asked “How on earth does blowing stuff up violently constrain unrelated growth mechanisms? This is the mystery.”

# Relativistic Rocket Science for Astrophysics

Apr 04 2011 | 19 comment(s)

Rocket science deserves its reputation as a difficult subject to approach. Relativistic rocket science is scarier still. If one tries to take this difficult, scary subject, and apply it to the way the biggest masses in all the Universe move, wouldn’t that be crazy? No, this idea is something that could get you certified. If you don’t know the difference between crazy and certified, well, neither did I before my 2 week vacation at Boulder Community Hospital. That story is too long to tell now.
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