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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...

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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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They start bad but they improve with time. I cannot say I like Pope Benedikt XVI yet, but I have the feeling that he is getting better as he ages, pretty much like Pope Johannes Paul II, Karol Woytila. Woytila started his adventure as a Pope by playing the head of state, flying overseas to shake hands with dictators, spelling pages over pages of reactionary speeches -and then he improved. He become, so to speak, more human: a strange feat for a man whose mandate was to impersonate the link between Man and God.
A really interesting piece of news comes from the CERN laboratory today. The CMS experiment has detected a handful of Z boson decays in events featuring the collision between heavy ions, accelerated to energies of hundreds of GeV per nucleon.
Scientific American features an excellent article by Garrett Lisi and James Owen Weatherell, with title "A Geometric Theory of Everything". It is a rather clear explanation of the ideas behind the recent articles published by Lisi on the E8 group and how this exceptionally rich mathematical structure could embed the representation of all particles and forces of nature.
The DZERO collaboration  published a few days ago the results of their search for multi-b-quark signatures of Supersymmetry in a large dataset of proton-antiproton collisions at 1.96 TeV. The possible large coupling of higgs bosons to b-quarks makes searches with many b-quark-jets worth pursuing at the Tevatron.
The arxiv is featuring a new paper by Darien Wood, member and spokesperson of the DZERO experiment and a distinguished physicist with lots of experience in hadron collider physics. The paper is titled "The Physics Case for Extended Tevatron Running" and it is an explanation of the benefits that a Run III until 2014 will bring to our knowledge of high-energy physics.
As beautiful as they get, or even more so. It is hard to express the beauty of the event that the CMS collaboration published today. CMS, which stands for "compact muon solenoid", is one of the two main detectors operating at the CERN Large Hadron Collider (the other is ATLAS). The duo is seeking evidence for the Higgs boson, the only elementary particle predicted by the Standard Model that still awaits to be discovered.