In over 15 years of blogging, in this and previous sites, I have mostly stayed away from the topic of climate change, the environmental catastrophe we are creating with our "perennial growth" myths and our disdain of our planet and the other species that inhabit it, and the continuous slaughter of over a billion animals every year for our unnecessarily opulent lunch tables. 

Today I am back from one of the most interesting workshops I ever attended to, and I wish to share some thoughts I had on possible ways to enhance our research of new ideas for future particle detectors with you. Those ideas come from discussions with other participants to the workshop, or just from re-digesting things I have been pondering over for a while. 

To appreciate what B mesons are, and what is the magic of their behaviour, which is the topic of this article, I need to give you a three-paragraph introduction below.

At the smallest distance scales, matter is made of quarks and leptons, which we consider as point-like objects endowed with different properties and interactions. Most of the matter around us is in fact made up of three-quark systems: protons and neutrons, organized in tightly packed nuclei kept together by the strong force; with electrons (which are the lightest charged leptons) orbiting around them thanks to the electromagnetic force attracting them to the protons. 

Physicists from the CMS experiment at CERN's Large Hadron Collider have used the total data sample of 13 TeV proton-proton collisions collected in the past few years to search for resonant decays of heavy hadrons into pairs of J/Psi mesons, and they found three of them. 
One of the three new resonances is likely to be the same as a particle already identified for the first time by the competitor LHCb experiment, while the other two are new finds. LHCb is also a LHC detector, but it is one optimized for heavy hadron spectroscopy; while CMS is a "general purpose" detector built with the primary goal of finding the Higgs boson (a 2012 success) and searching for new phenomena at the highest-energy frontier. 

Yes, I know - I have touched on this topic already a couple of times in this blog, so you have the right to be bored and surf away. I am bound to talk about this now and then anyway, though, because this is the focus of my research these days. 
Recently I was in the Elba island (a wonderful place) for a conference on advanced detectors for fundamental physics, and I presented a poster there on the topic of artificial-intelligence-assistend design of instruments for fundamental physics. Below is the poster (I hope it's readable in this compressed version - if you really want a better pic just ask).