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A Research Position In Neuromorphic Computing And Nanophotonics Open In Padova, Italy

Five days are left to apply to a 2-year research position at INFN-Padova, to work in the context...

Apply For The USERN Prize, Win Cash, And Get A Keynote Talk In Astana

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A Record Of Past Activities

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Surviving Queues: 2 - On The Road

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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 a number of exxperiments in physics and astrophysics, including the... Read More »

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In thirty minutes I will jump on a flight to Frankfurt and from there to Kobe, Japan, where I am attending the twenty-ninth edition of the Physics in Collisions conference. No big talk in store for me this time; no Westminster central hall kind of thing, nor spotlights or interviews. I will just be presenting a poster. Well, two.
Today I wish to offer you the figure attached at the bottom of this article, which shows a combination of recent determinations of the rate at which the Tevatron proton-antiproton collisions produce single top quarks.
"It is not who votes that counts, but who counts the votes"
(From a sentence attributed to Josef Stalin)

With a thought to Middle Eastern elections...
Today, although fully submerged by an anomalous wave of errands which had been patiently waiting for my return at work, I heroically managed to dig out of the ArXiv a paper worth a close look.
Back from vacations, I found the usual pile of errands, tons of unattended emails, papers to review to take care of at work. I got home pretty tired tonight, and I was more than else looking for some relaxation when I logged on the Internet Chess Club for a couple of blitz chess games. Instead, I found some fulfilment by winning a short game with the black pieces. White was International Master Vladimir Barskij, Fide ELO 2419 in the current list, number 2273 in the world. Not a top chess player, but one of those I sometimes have a chance of beating.
The figure shown below represents the best measurement of the top quark mass ever obtained by a single experiment, and it is a determination with a less than 1% total uncertainty. It has been approved last week by the CDF experiment at Fermilab.

The CDF experiments collects proton-antiproton collisions delivered by the Tevatron collider, which imparts the projectiles with 1 TeV of energy each, for a center-of-mass energy of 2 TeV. This is still the highest energy ever achieved by a collider, although the record is going to be soon stripped off Fermilab by the Large Hadron Collider, which is due to start colliding protons with other protons at 7 TeV of energy this coming fall.