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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...

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 »

On W+4 Jet Rates At The LHC

Sep 14 2010 | comment(s)

A very important new theoretical study appeared yesterday in the hep-ph preprint arxiv.
Titled "Precise Predictions on W+4 Jet Production at the Large Hadron Collider", it is signed by a strong team of theorists: C. Berger, Z. Bern, L. Dixon, F. Febres Cordero, D. Forde, T. Gleisberg, H. Ita, D. Kosover, and D. Maitre. I will try to summarize its importance for the physics of the Large Hadron Collider in accessible terms tomorrow; for the time being I just wish to point it out for those who are capable of reading the paper but are too lazy to check the arxiv daily. I know, you belong to this set but you won't admit it!

No Quirks, Says DZERO

Sep 07 2010 | comment(s)

No, it is not a typo. I do mean "quirks": these are hidden-valley brothers of quarks predicted to exist in some fancy new physics scenarios. These particles have been sought by the DZERO experiment in a large dataset of proton-antiproton collisions, making use of a neat technique which I thought could be interesting to briefly explain today.

Have A Virtual Tour Of CDF Control Room!

Sep 06 2010 | comment(s)

A Labor Day special: I am offering you to have a short virtual tour of the CDF Control Room today, free of charge. I am currently on shift there, and we are taking data. If you send me an email with your skype account coordinates, I will call you and show you the place with a web-cam. No audio though, since I cannot disturb my colleagues here. I will complement the visual roundabout tour of the monitors with a few short text explanations. The service is subject to abrupt interruptions or delays due to possible emergencies I need to take care of.

My email is firstname.lastname (at) google.com . Beware of the spelling of my first name - 30% of English natives put one M and two S in it.

The Say Of The Week

Sep 05 2010 | comment(s)

"Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation."

Oscar Wilde

Aftermath Of A Rumor

Sep 04 2010 | comment(s)

Back to breathing the air of Fermilab after a full year away, I got to gauge a bit better the aftermath of the little incident created by a posting of mine in July. As often happens with internet bubbles, they look quite dramatic as they inflate, but they leave no big scars. Two months have passed, and this looks like a good time to post here some ruminations about the general issue.

Physics Experiments And Confidentiality

Another Week On Shift For CDF

Sep 03 2010 | comment(s)

Since today, and for a full week, I will be serving as Scientific Coordinator (SciCo) of the crew operating the CDF experiment at Fermilab. This honorable task (or in alternative, the serving as "Consumer Operator" or "ACE") is required to all collaborators once or twice per year, in order to provide 24/7 operation of the detector and supervision of the data-taking activities.