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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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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.
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.
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 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.
I see people around very, very interested in what the CDF experiment has recently unearthed. I am talking, of course, of the jet-jet resonance candidate that they observe in their W+jets sample. A recent update of the previous result shows that the significance of the bump is just short of the coveted five-sigma: that is to say, for non-insiders, there is now a chance in two or three millions that the effect is due to a statistical fluke.
I Will Vote

I Will Vote

Jun 06 2011 | comment(s)

Democracy should never be given for granted. So if you are given a chance to cast a vote, you should not overlook the fact that voting is both your duty toward your country, and a right you need to exercise if you don't want to lose it.

In Italy on June 12th and 13th citizens are called to vote directly to abolish a couple of laws that the current government insisted on forcing upon us. I will not spend a word on the laws themselves, since that is not the point of this short post. Rather, I want to explain the importance of going to vote, and why I hope that Italian readers of this blog will do it.