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Choosing Your Bets: The Selection Bias

As some of the long-time readers of this blog know, in this column I have occasionally discussed...

Have A Master In Science, Want A Post-Doc Position Directly?

Do you have a master in Science, and want to start a Post-Doc position directly? You can have it...

A Chess Study Requiring Backpropagation

The following position is a win for white. But how?It seems like white is able to grab a knight...

Co-Design Of Scientific Experiments

Next Monday, or Tuesday at the latest, you will find a new bulky paper in the arXiv. Titled "On...

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 »

A Short Story Of Dijet Resonances

Apr 11 2011 | 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 | 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 | 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 | 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.

Thoughts On The Hyperball Algorithm

Apr 02 2011 | comment(s)

I have recently dusted off an algorithm I had invented eight years ago, one I dubbed "Hyperball algorithm". It might come handy for predicting the b-tagging rate in CMS events with jets, for an analysis I am thinking of doing. Since saying more would violate a dozen rules so let's leave it at that, and let me instead describe the old idea... Just for fun.

Predictions for the Higgs at the Tevatron

Farewell - I Quit Blogging

Apr 01 2011 | comment(s)

This is my last post of my blog.

I have decided to totally quit my blogging activities after the last incident. My participation in the scientific collaborations CDF and CMS has always been a problem, since whenever I discussed a topic here even mildly related to their business there was the potential of receiving heat from those colleagues of mine who believe that the scientific integrity of the experiment can be harmed by a blog post, or who imagine that grant reviewers be influenced by what is written by a collaborator in a private blog.