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Enrico Stomeo - A Lifelong Passion For Meteor Studies

I was reached this evening by the news of the passing of a dear friend, Enrico Stomeo. Enrico was...

Surviving Queues: 1 - At The Airport

Nobody likes to wait in line. Whether you are sitting in your car waiting to reach the toll booths...

Choosing Your Bets: The Selection Bias

As some of the long-time readers of this blog know, in this column I have occasionally discussed...

Have A Master In Science, Want A Post-Doc Position Directly?

Do you have a master in Science, and want to start a Post-Doc position directly? You can have it...

Tommaso Dorigo

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 »

New CERN Results On Rare B Decays: A Tombstone To SUSY ?

Jun 08 2012 | comment(s)

The CERN average of searches for rare B decays to muon pairs has been shown yesterday in a talk given by Mitesh Patel at the "Physics at the LHC" conference, which is being held in Vancouver (BC) this week. And the results are not very encouraging for supporters of Supersymmetry: the data is compatible with a Standard Model signal, but there is almost no space left for additional contributions due to the exchange of virtual SUSY particles in the loops producing the decays.

NASA Does It Better

Jun 06 2012 | comment(s)

The winner picture of the Venus transit must be the one below, whose original version can be found here. Thanks Bente Lilya Bye for posting the link on her Facebook page!

The picture was taken by Hinode, a joint JAXA-NASA mission to study the Sun's magnetism in and around sunspots.

In case you ain't seen it yet

Jun 06 2012 | comment(s)

Well, so as predicted Venus passed over the disk of our Sun yesterday (this morning, if you live in Europe), and it produced quite a show, as many pictures and videos available around testify. To make the view more pleasing, our Sun was showing a discrete amount of solar spots, betraying the fact that we are approaching Solar Max (there is a 11-year cycle of solar activity, which manifests itself visually with black spots appearing on the disk, and on the Earth with auroras and electromagnetic disturbances).

In case you want a quick link to a nice slideshow showing Venus crossing the Sun's disk in a set of some thirty images, please visit this flicker site.

Enough Luminosity For A Higgs Discovery!

Jun 05 2012 | comment(s)

The LHC collider has been producing proton-proton collisions at a centre-of-mass energy of 8 TeV for two months now, and the integrated luminosity collected by the CMS experiment has surpassed the mark of 4 inverse femtobarns (see figure below). That's already about 80% of the total bounty of 2011!

Venus Approaching The Sun

Jun 04 2012 | comment(s)

For the second and last time this century, the planet Venus will pass over the visible disk of our Sun for observers located in the Americas (in the evening of June 5th) and western Europe (in the morning of June 6th). The event has a noteworthy scientific value -particularly for exoplanetary searches-, but it is also quite spectacular to observe, if you have some modest equipment (but you should be able to spot it with your naked eye, provided you only look through a thick-smoked glass; never look at the Sun directly!). The added value is that probably none of us will be around the next time this event occurs, in 2117.

The Quote of the Week

Jun 01 2012 | comment(s)

"The decay widths have higher-order perturbative QCD corrections, and these are particularly important for the decay which dominates over a wide range of (light) Higgs masses. The main effect is to cause the quark mass to run from its "constituent quark" value at to a lower value at ."