Measuring the value and the impact of a scientist on her field of research using as data her scientific papers, the number of citations these papers got, and the prestige of the scientific journals where these were published is no easy matter.

Grading Researchers: The H-Index

There is a large body of literature on how best to account for all these factors together: the discipline is called "scientometrics". Of course, the goal is to summarize the productivity of a scholar in a single number; possibly one with at most double digits, since decision-makers who hire or fund are usually incapable of handling more complex data. One notable attempt is the Hirsch Index, proposed in 2005 by a physicist, Jorge Hirsch.

Top quarks are most often produced in pairs at hadron colliders. The reason of this fact is that the strong interaction, which produces most of the reactions between the projectiles, is flavor-blind, and it cannot create a single new flavor of quarks out of nothing. In other words, physical processes mediated by strong interactions conserve the quantum numbers describing the difference between the number of quarks and antiquarks of any given kind: U, D, C, S, T, and B.

In this sorry age for Supersymmetry (SUSY) phenomenologists, it is quite easy to step on an aching toe while discussing the results of the Large Hadron Collider experiments, whose results have let these physicists down by excluding the presence of SUSY where most of them used to put their moneys until yesterday.

Today I read with pleasure a paper on Supersymmetry which is surprisingly well written and clear. I can only warmly advise anybody seriously interested in the phenomenology of SUSY (in particular, the version called "constrained minimal supersymmetric extension of the Standard Model", cMSSM for friends) to give it a close look.

The cMSSM is a very attractive "minimal" option to extend the Standard Model with a minimal addition of parameters (still, quite a few, as in any Supersymmetric theory). Its appeal lies in the fact that one may basically study the resulting predicted phenomenology by just investigating five crucial parameters.

The family of Upsilon resonances is among the few things that can always cheer me up and remind me about my fascination for elementary particles when I get bored about my job. The sight of their mass peaks implies that heavy quarks bind together exactly as electrons and positrons do, orbiting around one another for a brief instant of time. An impossibly brief one, and yet quite long for subnuclear standards. It is always a refreshing and inspiring sight (below, see the three lowest-lying Upsilon states as they are seen by the CDF experiment at the Fermilab Tevatron collider, in a sizable fraction of their Run II data: lovely, aren't they ?).