The twelfth edition of “Quark Confinement and the Hadron Spectrum“, a particle physics conference specialized in QCD and Heavy Ion physics, will be held in Thessaloniki this year, from

While tediously compiling a list of scientific publications that chance to have my name in the authors list (I have to apply for a career advancement and apparently the committee will scrutinize the hundred-page-long lists of that kind that all candidates submit), I discovered today that I just passed the mark of 1000 published articles. This happened on February 18th 2016 with the appearance in print of a paper on dijet resonance searches by CMS. Yay! And 7 more have been added to the list since then.

Exclusive production processes at hadron collider are something magical. You direct two trucks at 100 miles per hour one against the other head-on, and the two just gently push each other sideways, continuing their trip perfectly unaffected, but leave behind a new entity (a cart?) produced with the energy of the glancing collision. 

Okay, this one was not about the umpteenth statistical fluctuation, hopelessly believed by somebody to be the start of a new era in particle physics. It's gotten too easy to place and win bets like that - the chance that the Standard Model breaks down due to some unexpected, uncalled-for resonance is so tiny that any bet against it is a safe one. And indeed I have won three bets of that kind so far (and cashed 1200 dollars and a bottle of excellent wine); plus, a fourth (for $100) is going to be payable soon.

After decades of theoretical studies and experimental measurements, forty years ago particle physicists managed to construct a very successful theory, one which describes with great accuracy the dynamics of subnuclear particles. This theory is now universally known as the Standard Model of particle physics. Since then, physicists have invested enormous efforts in the attempt of breaking it down.

It is not a contradiction: our understanding of the physical world progresses as we construct a progressively more refined mathematical representation of reality. Often this is done by adding more detail to an existing framework, but in some cases a complete overhaul is needed. And we appear to be in that situation with the Standard Model.