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On Rating Universities

In a world where we live hostages of advertisement, where our email addresses and phone numbers...

Goodbye Peter Higgs, And Thanks For The Boson

Peter Higgs passed away yesterday, at the age of 94. The scottish physicist, a winner of the 2013...

Significance Of Counting Experiments With Background Uncertainty

In the course of Statistics for Data Analysis I give every spring to PhD students in Physics I...

The Analogy: A Powerful Instrument For Physics Outreach

About a month ago I was contacted by a colleague who invited me to write a piece on the topic of...

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 »

Electron Neutrinos From Muon Neutrinos!

Jun 15 2011 | comment(s)

New results from the T2K collaboration have been presented at a KEK Physics Seminar today, and they are really interesting stuff. In a nutshell, six electron neutrino events have been seen by their far detector, illuminated by a pure and intense beam of muon neutrinos. The estimated backgrounds from non-oscillating-neutrino sources are estimated to amount to 1.5+-0.3 events, and the observed counts thus constitute a 2.5-standard-deviation effect, hopefully a first hint of direct detection of nu_mu -> nu_e oscillations.

LHC About to Reach The 1/fb Goal

Jun 14 2011 | comment(s)

The LHC has been running very well in the last few weeks, and I can announce, with some anticipation, that the 1-inverse-femtobarn line will be crossed in the next few days. Check it out in the figure below, which shows, together with the delivered luminosity (red line), the one acquired by the CMS experiment (that is, the part acquired with CMS fully operational).

The total bounty available before the next shutdown (end of June) is probably going to amount to 1.3-1.4/fb. Expect exciting new results by ATLAS and CMS for the summer 2011 conferences!

The Plot Of The Week - A Black Hole Candidate

Jun 14 2011 | comment(s)

CMS has recently produced an updated search for black hole production in the 7 TeV proton-proton collisions delivered by the LHC. The data sample now consists of 190 inverse picobarns of collisions collected in 2011, and the limits set on black hole production are more stringent.

DZERO Refutes New CDF Dijet Resonance!

Jun 10 2011 | comment(s)

And here they come. Much awaited (and anticipated), today the DZERO collaboration presents their findings in the search of the same dijet resonance which made it to the New York Times as well as to several physics blogs around the web, and which brought frantic theorists back to the blackboard to try and figure out a model that could allocate the cumbersome new find.

Guess The Plot 4: Two Hypotheses

Jun 09 2011 | comment(s)

Today's guess of the plot will be very poor of comments on my side, for reasons I will disclose in due time. Also, it is unfortunately a rather expert-only one, since it represents something that experts will surely recognize for its generalities, while only the details will probably remain mysterious to them.

I will be glad to read your guesses in the comments thread, which I hope will be plenty and insightful. Hopefully in a few days I will disclose what the plot represents.

UPDATE: In place of the plot, events force me to put in its place something else, for just a few hours. See below - the change is not dramatic, but what is added is probably giving a stronger hint than what is taken off.

Ettore Majorana: The Mystery Might Be Solved

Jun 08 2011 | comment(s)

Ettore Majorana was maybe the most brilliant student of Enrico Fermi, and an outstanding physicist. He disappeared on March 25th 1938 at the age of 32 years, under mysterious circumstances and leaving no trace behind. The hypothesis that he committed suicide appears weak in the face of his withdrawing a conspicuous amount of money from his bank on the eve of his disappearance -he had a rational mind and such an action would have made little sense. Other hypotheses include an escape to Argentina, and even a collaboration with the third reich in Germany, where he had previously worked -Majorana had expressed anti-jew ideas in the past.