With the fresh news of the election of Pierluigi Campana as spokesperson of the LHCb experiment, the Italian participation to the LHC experiments at the CERN laboratories is close to a grand slam: three of the four experiments along the ring are led by Italian physicists. Campana joins Guido Tonelli (CMS), Fabiola Gianotti (ATLAS), and Jurgen Schukraft (ALICE).

Italians have consistently led CERN experiments, so the election of Campana is no surprise to most of us: still, it speaks volumes about the professionality of Italians in high-energy physics and the recognition that they are given by their colleagues abroad.

"At that time, although recognized for the very high quality and reliability of its accelerator engineering, CERN unfortunately did not have a similar reputation in its physics, and it was still recovering from disasters such as the "split A2" affair. CERN always seemed to be second best behind the leading U.S. laboratories, with their vastly more experienced physicists. And during the 1960s it had been repeatedly beaten into the ground, for example, over the discoveries of the Omega- hypheron, the two types of neutrinos, and CP violation in K0 decay. All these things could and should have been found first at CERN, with its far greater technical resources, but the Americans had vastly more experience and know-how."

Donald Perkins

Despite time is a scarce resource for me these days, and my "working time balance" shows deep red, I am presently spending some of it to investigate a very interesting statistical effect of general nature, although specially connected to the issue of discovery thresholds in particle physics.

I am triggered by the recent eported observation of a new particle, which has been claimed at a significance corresponding to the coveted 5 standard deviations after a previous evidence had been extracted from 40% less data at 3.8 standard deviations. The matter has left me slightly dubious about the precision of the latter claim.

Now, before I state the problem, let me explain in short how significance is calculated in these kinds of new particle searches.