Just appeared on Physics World online:
the first of my two feature articles on LHC physics in 2011, which are being published in this month's issue.
Ben Allanach is a professor of theoretical physics at the University of Cambridge. Before that he was a post-doc at LAPP (Annecy, France), CERN (Geneva, Switzerland), Cambridge (UK) and the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory (UK). I noticed a recent article of his in the arxiv, and asked him to report on it here, given the interest that the recent LHC results have stirred in the community. He graciously agreed.... So let us hear it from him! Blimey, I'm tired. I'm also elated and excited and grateful to my lovely girlfriend, who's not only putting up with my long hours, distracted head and general ensuing grumpiness, she's even looking after me.
Both the CMS and ATLAS collaborations have already started to exclude meaningful regions of the parameter space of Supersymmetric models with the data they collected in 2010. And Physics World is on the news today with a
online article by Kathy Mc Alpine, the famous rapper physicist who wrote the lirics and interpreted
one of the biggest Youtube hits in the category of science popularization. If you have not watched it yet, please rush to do so now. Six million people (and counting) have done so before you already.
A nice piece of news in my mailbox today: it appears that the CMS collaboration, the experiment I work for at the CERN Large Hadron Collider, has got four different scientific papers approved for publication in the course of the same week. What is more, the four articles will be published on three different international magazines of clear authority. A true success !
Despite my chronic lack of time these days, I always manage to find ten minutes for a blitz chess game on the internet. It is a total waste of time and brain energy, but it never fails to provide some adrenaline shot in my veins. And at times some real satisfaction, when I play a good game and/or I get the better hand with a titled player.
Today I got a little of both, when I won with black against Grandmaster Lars Karlsson (elo 2466), a Swedish player. Not a super-Grandmaster, admittedly, but still a dangerous player with an expected score above 90% against me (I am rated in the 2050 range. Here is the game with minimal commentary.
Karlsson-Dorigo, 20-2-2011
(Jesper(GM)-tonno)
Today I spoke at
a conference on "QCD advances" which is being held in Les Houches, an amiable small town near Chamonix, on the french slopes of Mont Blanc. The content of my talk is
accessible from the conference web site, but I guess that I should provide here a summary of what I discussed.
Enrico Stomeo - A Lifelong Passion For Meteor Studies
Surviving Queues: 1 - At The Airport
Choosing Your Bets: The Selection Bias
