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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 »

Yes, I have that twisted nerve too - I sneeze when I shouldn't

Aug 26 2012 | comment(s)

Okay, I am coming out for the interest of Science.

I read today this article, which does not really say anything new to me, but for some reason triggered my wish to speak up about the condition. The article explains clearly that some people have a twisted connection in their nerves, sort of a short-circuit, which makes them sneeze when they think about sex (others have the same kind of problem making them sneeze when they are looking at bright light sources, e.g. the sun).

My Take On The Would-Be Particle At 38 MeV

Aug 22 2012 | comment(s)

Everybody seems to be talking about this new would-be particle, allegedly observed in diphoton decays in this paper by Kh. Abraamyan et al. at JINR, and consistent with an earlier claim of two physicists (van Beveren and Rupp) who had considered several distributions published by different collaborations.

The Plot Of The Week - Z' Not Here

Aug 20 2012 | comment(s)

Perhaps a bit too simple, but certainly appealing. Extensions of the Standard Model which imply the existence of a new U(1) gauge group to complement the SU(2)xU(1) structure of electroweak interactions have been put forth in a number of slightly different versions. All imply the existence of a new Z' boson, a heavier version of the Z0. For those not yet introduced to the latter, the Z0 is the neutral vector boson hypothesized by Glashow, Salam and Weinberg in the sixties to complete a triplet of weak currents and thereby allow the unification of weak and electromagnetic interactions.

ICARUS: Neutrinos Travel At Light Speed. Period.

Aug 14 2012 | comment(s)

Little less than one year ago the world of fundamental physics was shaken by the bold claim of the OPERA collaboration, which produced a measurement of the time of flight of neutrinos traveling underground from Geneva to the Gran Sasso mine in central Italy. The beam of neutrinos, produced by the CERN SpS proton synchrotron, was observed to produce interactions in the large mass of the OPERA detector with about 60 nanosecond anticipation with respect to what would be expected for a particle traveling at exactly the speed of light (2439096.1+-0.3 nanoseconds, since the flight path is of 731221.95+-0.09 meters).

The Quote of the Week: Ask Questions!

Aug 11 2012 | comment(s)

The way to get people to know you, attach your name to your face, and realize you are knowledgeable is, maybe suprisingly, to ask questions at meetings, as often as possible. You do not understand something about a plot your colleague is showing during his talk ? Ask about it. The x-axis labels are missing ? Ask what the heck are the units, even if Groucho's child of five could understand it. You arrive before the last slide and the speaker is saying she measured x with two inverse femtobarns ?

2012 CMS Luminosity: 10/fb And Counting!

Aug 10 2012 | comment(s)

The Large Hadron Collider is delivering as expected a large amount of integrated luminosity of proton-proton collisions to CMS and ATLAS, running at a centre-of-mass energy of 8 TeV. The total collected in 2012 by CMS has just now crossed the mark of 10 inverse femtobarns: this is twice as much data as that collected in 2011. And the CMS detector is working like a charm, with all subsystems collecting data flawlessly.

Physicists need large integrated luminosity to explore rare phenomena, and high energy to probe processes which may only "turn on" above a certain threshold. So given the x2 luminosity so far collected (but we will get to x5 by the end of the year!) and x1.14 energy, the discovery potential of 2012 data is already several times larger than that of 2011 data.