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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...

Turning 60

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

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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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Less than three weeks separate us from the XVI Neutrino Telescopes, a very interesting conference held in Venice every two years. The physics of neutrinos is a very special niche in the realm of particle physics, one not devoid of cunning experimental techniques, brilliant theoretical ideas, and offering possible avenues to discover new physics. Hence I am quite happy to be attending the event, from where I will also be blogging (hopefully with the help of a few students in Padova).(NB this article, as others with neutrinos as a subject for the next month or so, appears also in the conference blog).
On Friday I traveled to Belluno, a town just south of the north-eastern Italian alps, to give a lecture on particle physics to high-school students for the "International Masterclasses". This was the umpteenth time that I gave more or less the same talk in the last decade or so; but it's not my fault, as particle physics has changed very little in the meantime. Yes, we discovered the Higgs boson, and yes, we excluded many possible extensions of the standard model. But the one-line summary remains the same: we continue to seek, but are not quite sure we'll find, a hint of what lies beyond.
A preprint article by the IceCube collaboration captured my attention today in the Cornell Arxiv, and even more interesting was the main result of the analysis it reports, which can be shown as a "temperature plot" on an equilateral triangle. We will get to that, but let me first explain what is the experiment, what are the goals, and what it is that was measured.

The sixteenth edition of the internationally known Neutrino Telescopes conference will take place on March 2nd-6th 2015 in the usual venue of Palazzo Franchetti in Venice. This is a conference which gathers from around the world researchers who study neutrino physics and related topics. 
James D. Bjorken, also known as "BJ" by colleagues and physicists around the world, has been awarded the prestigious 2015 Wolf prize in Physics together with cosmologist Robert Kirshner. Bjorken deserves a lot of credit for his contribution to subnuclear physics: the official motivation is 

"For predicting scaling in deep inelastic scattering, leading to identification of nucleon's pointlike constituents "

Today I collected in my mailbox the hefty "Review of Particle Physics", the publication of the Particle Data Group which contains a summary of everything we know about subatomic particles. For the first time, the publisher is a Chinese journal: Chinese Physics C. This might be considered a detail, but it is a sign of times: China has been increasing its involvement in fundamental physics research in the last decade, and it may well become the leading country in this business in the future.