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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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Fundamental Glossary For The Higgs Broadcast

Fundamental Glossary For The Higgs Broadcast

Dec 09 2011 | comment(s)

As everybody knows, next Tuesday we will be treated with a CERN webcast of the analysis results on the Higgs boson searches by ATLAS and CMS. I imagine many of you will want to tune in, but fear you will not grasp much given the typically technical jargon that physicists use to communicate the details of their analyses.

So I thought I would provide here a very short glossary of terms you are likely to hear, and which you might have a hard time understanding correctly. Let me see if I can do a decent job.

Waiting For December 13th

Waiting For December 13th

Dec 07 2011 | comment(s)

It is by now public that Rolf Heuer, the Director General of CERN, in announcing for December 13th two back-to-back talks of the CMS and ATLAS experiments on their Higgs search results with 2011 data, warned that the results might not be conclusive yet. Besides, nobody really could expect them to be, since the sensitivity expected by both ATLAS and CMS in the still not excluded region of the Higgs mass, with 5/fb of data per experiment and 7 TeV running conditions, ranges from 2 to 4 standard deviations in the rosiest circumstances.
Alejandro Rivero: Fermion Mass Coincidences And Other Fun Ideas

Alejandro Rivero: Fermion Mass Coincidences And Other Fun Ideas

Dec 04 2011 | comment(s)

The text below was graciously written for this blog by Alejandro Rivero (below),  a friend who has contributed to this blog other times in the past. His theoretical ideas are off the mainstream, but in a way which makes them interesting to me. I hope some of you will appreciate reading about the whole thing in summary here - Alejandro has a few papers out which you may want to read if you are specifically interested in the matter.

Higgs Expectations

Higgs Expectations

Dec 02 2011 | comment(s)

Update: I am keeping out of this, but you may well be interested in reading what Gibbs, Woit, and Motl have to say about recent leaks on the ATLAS and CMS results. So I hope I won't be crucified for three general links now!

Update 2: And it is now public that a seminar at CERN will be given by ATLAS and CMS on December 13th. So the wait is almost over, officially...

I have not written in a while - a full week. This is uncharacteristic enough that I owe you some sort of explanation.
Padova Loses Milla

Padova Loses Milla

Nov 25 2011 | comment(s)

Sadly, this morning Milla Baldo Ceolin passed away.

Milla was a volcanic physicist, and a fantastic professor. I had the pleasure of following her course of "Fisica Superiore" in the late eighties, and I remember her brilliant lessons, insightful and mind-broadening.

Milla was born in 1924, and graduated in Physics in 1951. In 1963 she was the first woman to become a professor in the University of Padova. Her research encompasses fifty years of subnuclear physics, and is especially centered on weak interactions. But in Padova, especially in the last two or three decades, her name was especially associated with neutrinos, the phenomenal particles at whose study her research was mostly aimed.
Multi-Muons In CDF: The Mystery Continues

Multi-Muons In CDF: The Mystery Continues

Nov 24 2011 | comment(s)

Do you remember the multi-muon anomaly in CDF ? The matter was discussed with quite some detail in a series of posts in this blog (back then at wordpress). In a nutshell, CDF could not explain their sample of events containing two muons, when these particles had a very large impact parameter (the impact parameter is the minimum distance of a trajectory from the interaction point: a large value indicates that the particle was produced elsewhere).