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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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This is my last post of my blog.

I have decided to totally quit my blogging activities after the last incident. My participation in the scientific collaborations CDF and CMS has always been a problem, since whenever I discussed a topic here even mildly related to their business there was the potential of receiving heat from those colleagues of mine who believe that the scientific integrity of the experiment can be harmed by a blog post, or who imagine that grant reviewers be influenced by what is written by a collaborator in a private blog.
On today's online version of the highest-diffusion newspaper in Italy, Il Corriere Della Sera (a bit too right-winged for me, but still an important source) stands a piece signed by none less than Carlo Rubbia, Physics Nobel prize in 1984 for the discovery of W and Z bosons. Despite his not so young age any more, Carlo is still extremely active in the field of high-energy physics, where he has moved his interest into neutrino physics.
It has been a while since I last wrote about results from the DZERO collaboration, and I am happy to be given a chance to do so by my casual Monday morning browsing of the most recent Arxiv preprints.
"The observed exclusion limit is found from the point where the 95% quantile (dotted
line) crosses the median value of the distribution of Q values for the QCD prediction
(dashed line). This occurs at Lambda = 9.5 TeV. The expected limit is Lambda = 5.7 TeV. [...]
As a cross-check, a Bayesian analysis of F(mjj) has been performed, [...]. This analysis sets a 95% credibility level of Lambda > 6.7 TeV. The expected limit from this Bayesian analysis is 5.7 TeV, comparable to the CLs+b expected limit. While the observed limit from CLs+b analysis is significantly higher than the Bayesian results, we have no basis on which to exclude the CLs+b result a posteriori."
This might become the title of a series of posts, much like my "say of the week" series. In fact, the Large Hadron Collider is back in operation since earlier this month, and the instantaneous luminosity at which it collides protons at a center-of-mass energy of 7 TeV is going to keep gradually increasing, as better orbit parameters are found, more protons are injected in the machine, more bunches are made to circulate, and beams are squeezed in the surroundings of the experimental halls.

Still, it feels nice to report that the value of L = 2.4E32 cm^-2 s^-1 has been now achieved, a full 20% more than the highest number recorded in the 2010 running.
The CDF collaboration sent to the preprint arxiv a new paper a few days ago. In it, they report on a measurement of the mass difference of top and anti-top quarks. The result would not be worth discussing in detail, if it did not show a 2-sigma discrepancy which might be the first hint of a CPT violation. So let me discuss it here.