The Quote Of The Week - Neutrino Mass Hierarchy and Matter Effects

Interaction with matter changes the neutrino mixing and effective mass splitting in a way that...

Will Do Peer Review - For Money

Preparing the documents needed for an exam for a career advancement, to a scientist like me, is...

Tight Constraints On Dark Matter From CMS

Although now widely accepted as the most natural explanation of the observed features of the universe...

The Periodic Diet

It is a well-known fact that given the availability of food, we eat far more than what would be...

 Tommaso Dorigo I am an experimental particle physicist working with the CMS experiment at CERN. In my spare time I play chess, abuse the piano, and aim my dobson telescope at faint galaxies.... Read More » Blogroll

# Feynman Explains Quarks With A Burp

Jan 16 2010 | 2 comment(s)

"One way of thinking about the confinement problem was suggested by e+ e- annihilation into hadrons. Initially, the virtual photon dissociates into a quark $q$ and an antiquark $\bar q$ that move with almost the speed of light back-to-back. Feynman had argued that additional $q \bar q$pairs would be produced in the region between them, along the line separating the initially produced $q \bar q$. The new pairs and original $q \bar q$would rearrange and become a bunch of outgoing mesons [...].

# The Say Of The Week

Jan 14 2010 | 0 comment(s)

"The threat is much stronger than its execution"

Aaron Nimzovich (complaining to the arbiter of a chess match that his opponent had put a cigar in his mouth, after the arbiter had pointed out that the cigar was unlit).

# New Rare B Decays Nailed By CDF: The Door To New Physics ?

Jan 13 2010 | 1 comment(s)

The CDF Collaboration has recently produced a new analysis of proton-antiproton collisions at the now second-world-best collision energy of 1.96 TeV. They searched for very rare decays of the B mesons, particles composed of, would you guess, a b-quark and a lighter partner orbiting around each other.

# An appetizer: Rare B Decay Asymmetries

Jan 12 2010 | 1 comment(s)

As if taken by a spell, my joking claim to be on strike in the last post grew to become one of the longest streaks of absence from blogging of the last few months, for a series of irrelevant reasons tightly packed together.

In the meantime I have tried to put together an article on a recent very interesting measurement performed by the CDF collaboration: a study of very rare decays of B mesons, which can now not only determine the rate of said decays, but also have a taste at subtle kinematical effects in the distribution of the final states. The distributions are a new key to discriminate the existence of new physics in these rare processes.

# The Approved CMS Phi Signal From 900 GeV Data

Jan 08 2010 | 19 comment(s)

Shoot. Today I am on strike.

This morning I decided to post here an article describing the details of a new result just approved by the CMS collaboration, the observation of a nice signal of phi meson decays. It is a result of which I am quite proud, and although not really a big deal, it is a nice way to start the new year, while we wait for more data from the LHC.

I had just finished writing the 200-lines piece describing the likelihood fit to the mass distribution, when I decided to save the draft with the "publish" box unmarked, to give it a last reading before submitting it. And the crazy web interface logged me off the site instead!

# Three Top Quarks: A Door To New Physics ?

Jan 06 2010 | 11 comment(s)

Today's visit to the Cornell Arxiv, the repository where scientific papers on physics, astrophysics, mathematics, and a few other disciplines are made publically accessible before getting published on paper, was a productive one. Some casual browsing allowed me to learn a few random things on topics I know little or nothing about; but what really made my day was reading study by a few distinguished theorists (Vernon Barger, Wai-Yee Keung, and Brian Yencho), who considered a collider signature I had been fantasizing about in the past.