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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 »

ATLAS Reach For The Higgs Boson

Jul 21 2010 | comment(s)

The Atlas collaboration made public, just in time for the 2010 ICHEP conference in Paris, the projected reach of their searches for standard model Higgs bosons. This is a whole set of interesting new results which, although necessarily still based on simulations, tell us a lot about what we might see toward the end of next year at the LHC.

Here I will just flash a couple of the results, because the plentiful online documentation that ATLAS provided makes it a worthless exercise on my part to just echo it here. However, maybe I can comment the most relevant plots for those of you too lazy to browse the information-thick ATLAS pages.

So Was The Rumor More Than Just A Rumor, Or Was It A Honest Rumor?

Jul 17 2010 | comment(s)

So, now we know. There is no 3-sigma signal from the Tevatron.... Sure, because they have not combined their MSSM searches yet!

Crucification

I will spend little time here discussing the various colourful ways by means of which I have been depicted:

- unreliable source of information
- fame-seeking blogger
- Paris Hilton of Physics
- Less trustworthy than Paul the Octopus
- and I could go on, but I prefer to leave these envious utterings where they first diffused their stench.

I am amused by the attention, but rather disappointed by the utter failure of all these commentators to understand what went wrong here: the press jumped at this gossip, without a blink, where there simply was no story !

Prayer to the Funding Agency Reviewer

Jul 15 2010 | comment(s)

Prayer to the Funding Agency Reviewer

(dedicated to those who worry about the detrimental effect of rumours)

Oh Funding Reviewer, on whose hands
Rests the destiny of full many an experiment:
Be true to yourself, and bias not
Thy sober judgement through the browsing
Of tricky sites or malicious magazines.

You were chosen, wise among the wise,
To distribute thy moneys to the worthy.
Human knowledge is at the stake:
Neglect the rumours, and listen not
To lesser souls. Let the Science be your guide.

The Rumored Rumor Had Been Rumored Before

Jul 13 2010 | comment(s)

Funny. While dozens of online media are abuzz with the (non)-news, and while Fermilab Today tweets that there is no Higgs in store for us and a blogger in search of fame is just spreading unconfirmed voices which have no foundation, Lubos Motl over at the Reference Frame gets more detailed rumors on the same thing, and that does make things a bit more interesting.

Status Of The "Find The Higgs" Plot

Jul 13 2010 | comment(s)

The CDF experiment has just released their new average of top quark mass measurements, obtained with analyses that use up to 5.6 inverse femtobarns of proton-antiproton collisions provided by the 2-TeV Tevatron collider: the new measurement is M(top) = 173.1 +- 0.7 (stat) +- 0.9 (syst) GeV, a measurement with a total uncertainty of 1.3 GeV, or 0.75%!

Have a look at the various measurements that enter the calculation in the graph below.