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Tommaso DorigoRSS Feed of this column.

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 »

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A 2.5 Sigma Higgs Signal From The Tevatron !

A 2.5 Sigma Higgs Signal From The Tevatron !

Jul 02 2012 | comment(s)

Robbing the LHC experiments of media attention for 41 hours, the CDF and DZERO experiments are presenting today the results of their searches of the Higgs boson in the full datasets of proton-antiproton collisions acquired in the course of the last 10 years. You can follow the live streaming of the Tevatron seminar at this link.

UPDATE: the live streaming is here.

Below I will give some introductory notions on Higgs physics at the Tevatron; at the bottom of this post I am discussing the actual results.

Introduction
Ideas On Higgs Couplings

Ideas On Higgs Couplings

Jun 28 2012 | comment(s)

A very interesting paper appeared one week ago in the Arxiv. It is titled "Higgs Self-Coupling Measurements at the LHC", and it is authored by M.Dolan, C.Englert, and M.Spannovsky. The idea is that once and if a Higgs boson is found at the LHC, the next natural step of the research would be its characterization as a pure standard model object or a more complex, or just different, beast.

Of course, once a signal were established, the LHC experiments would certainly want to measure all its properties as precisely as possible: mass, angular distributions, cross section in all the production mechanisms, and decay modes.
Basic Education For Particle Hunters: Significance And Rate Error

Basic Education For Particle Hunters: Significance And Rate Error

Jun 27 2012 | comment(s)

I am endlessly amazed by observing, time and again, that even experienced colleagues fall in the simplest statistical traps. Mind you, I do not claim to be any better - sorry, let me rephrase: to have been any better in the early days of my career as an experimentalist. But then, I started to appreciate that to really understand physics results I needed to at least get familiar with a small set of notions in basic Statistics.
The Quote of the Week

The Quote of the Week

Jun 26 2012 | comment(s)

"There is nothing new to be discovered in physics now. All that remains is more and more
precise measurement"
Lord Kelvin, 1900
A Pot-Pourri Of Particle Searches

A Pot-Pourri Of Particle Searches

Jun 25 2012 | comment(s)

As we near the first week of July, with the start of the International Conference of High-Energy Physics in Melbourne (July 2nd-8th) and the July 4th press release at CERN on the new results of Higgs boson searches by ATLAS and CMS, the attention to new particle searches is understandably increasing. And the question is what the new 8-TeV data produced by the LHC this year will give.

Will the final word on the existence (or absence) of the Higgs boson be said ? Will there be new particle discoveries ? Will the LHC surpass the Tevatron precision on the measurement of the top quark mass ? Is the Standard Model going to show cracks from the result of other, off-the-spotlight  measurements ?
The Quote of the Week

The Quote of the Week

Jun 22 2012 | comment(s)

"It is pure craziness what Politics is doing in our country (Italy, T.'s n.): that is, investing little and bad in research, letting the brightest minds escape, not rewarding excellence, and failing to attract foreign researchers. Not doing, that is, what is being done in Soccer, where Italy is in the first places, exactly because Soccer clubs deploy the best players, their selection is based on their merits, the best ones are very highly paid to avoid them to leave, and the best players are sought abroad to make the team a winning one. And even the coach, if (s)he does not bring home results, gets fired.

To sum it up, we in Italy occupy ourselves much more in the selection of feet than in the selection of  brains."