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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 »

ATLAS Supersymmetry Limits: How Sad To Be Always Right...

Apr 20 2011 | comment(s)

That's because you never learn anything new.

[By the way: if you were coming here to learn the solution of my riddle about the mysterious plot I posted here yesterday, be patient - I will publish an answer tomorrow on that issue.]

Guess The Plot: Solution And Comments

Apr 20 2011 | comment(s)

After the disturbance created by the Higgs rumour in ATLAS, I think we can go back to normal business - in this case, keeping my word on discussing things that were left hanging.

Your response to my small riddle was quite good, forcing me to provide a timely and exhaustive explanation of what is in the plot I posted a few days ago.

Guess The Plot!

Apr 19 2011 | comment(s)

A picture is worth a thousand words. This is true both for photographs and for graphs, but sometimes the words are spoken to the wrong ears. I would like to offer you a very simple, visual test today: show you a picture and let you guess what it represents. Depending on the response, this might end in oblivion or be tried again with another subject.

So the question is: what does the picture below represent ?

A few hints:

- I did the graph myself, and it took me 10' of programming and a tenth of a second of CPU on my laptop.

Theorists' Feeding Frenzy On CDF Resonance Continues

Apr 16 2011 | comment(s)

A casual look at the Arxiv hep-ph listings this morning was enough to confirm that the feeding frenzy of theoreticians around the latest bait thrown in the waters by CDF is not showing any sign of slowing down.

The paper in question is 1104.2893, and it discusses "Weak-triplet, color-octet scalars and the CDF dijet excess". In their model, the authors (B. Dobrescu and G. Krnjaic) argue in favour of an extension of the standard model which includes rthree new coloured particles, two charged and one neutral state.

The New XENON 100 Results On Dark Matter

Apr 14 2011 | comment(s)

The Xenon 100 collaboration has finally released the results of their data analysis, and the results are saying that there is no Dark Matter in sight so far. Since we live in an age where time is precious, I think many of you are only interested in the bottomline. I can give it to you straight away, in the form of the plot which summarizes the results.

Xenon 100 finds three events compatible with a dark matter signal, with a background expected from more mundane sources amounting to 1.8+-0.6 events. The limit they extract on the cross section versus mass of the hypothetical particle are shown below by a thick blue curve, which cuts into the flesh of the preferred parameter space of constrained minimal supersymmetric theories (in grey), pushing them farther away.

Natalie Heracleous on CMS Times