Physics

True Classical Black Holes Don't Exist Says Stephen Hawking. I Say He's Right.

In a paper posted to the arXiv a few days ago Stephen W. Hawking the preeminent expert on black holes argued quite effectively that given what we know about quantum gravity they don't exist. Quantum theory allows for matter and energy to escape from ...

Blog Post - Hontas Farmer - Feb 2 2014 - 9:26am

The Future Of US Particle Physics: Communication, Education And Outreach

Chapter 10 of the report on the 2013 community summer study held at Snowmass, titled "Communication, Education, and Outreach" is available since Jan 24th in the Cornell ArXiv. It is a 26-pages document describing the importance of outreach activi ...

Article - Tommaso Dorigo - Jan 27 2014 - 7:19am

Narsky And Porter: A Nice Review Of Analysis Techniques

I received yesterday a copy of the brand-new book by Ilya Narsky and Frank Porter, "Statistical Analysis Techniques in Particle Physics" (Wiley-vch 2014), and I would like to offer here my impressions and thoughts on the material. ...

Article - Tommaso Dorigo - Jan 31 2014 - 4:39am

Atlas Sees No Light From Quantum Black Holes

Black holes are all the rage these days, with theorists arguing about firewalls and Hawking's paper being handled by the press in rather improper ways. Meanwhile at the Large Hadron Collider ATLAS and CMS are furthering their searches for microscopic ...

Article - Tommaso Dorigo - Feb 3 2014 - 10:30am

February 1996: A Media Storm Hits CDF

On January 25th 1996 the CDF collaboration submitted for publication to Physical Review Letters  the result of their measurement of the rate of jet production as a function of jet transverse energy, performed on 20 inverse picobarns of data collected by th ...

Article - Tommaso Dorigo - Feb 4 2014 - 6:44am

First Principles, Hydrogen And Heavy Metal In The Early Cosmos

First principles are calculations that rely on established mathematical laws of nature without additional assumptions or special models. But when it comes to the early universe, what are those first principles? We're talking really ab initio- "f ...

Article - News Staff - Feb 5 2014 - 3:38pm

Particle Physics For High School Students

Yesterday I visited a high school in Treviso, a small centre in north-west Italy. The students of the last two years participate in a program called "masterclasses" which includes lessons on particle physics and astrophysics and a visit to the de ...

Blog Post - Tommaso Dorigo - Feb 15 2014 - 9:59am

Advanced Sensitivity To New Physics From Event Deconstruction

A new paper by Davison Soper and Michael Spannowsky has been sent to the Cornell preprint ArXiv last week. It proposes a new technique to reconstruct the decay of heavy particles within hadronic jets, and shows how this can improve the sensitivity to heavy ...

Article - Tommaso Dorigo - Feb 17 2014 - 5:02am

Higgs Decays To Z-Gamma Pairs: The Next Challenge

The ATLAS collaboration at the Large Hadron Collider, CERN's 8-TeV proton-proton collider now being recommissioned to run at the close-to-design energy of 13 TeV in 2015, has published a few days ago on the Cornell ArXiv the result of a search for Hig ...

Article - Tommaso Dorigo - Feb 17 2014 - 1:06pm

Strangelet Fear-Mongering And Death By Review

I believe I am not alone in being fascinated by the ongoing debates about this or that physics experiment being on the verge of destroying the Earth. Microscopic black holes produced by mistake in particle physics experiments sinking down to the center of ...

Article - Tommaso Dorigo - Feb 18 2014 - 10:24am