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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 the CMS and the SWGO experiments. He is the president of the Read More »

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A recent paper in the arxiv describes the observation, in 7 TeV proton-proton collisions produced by the LHC collider in the core of the LHCb detector, of a new decay mode of the particle called "B-sub-s", a meson which is a bound state of a anti-bottom-quark and an s quark.
"The only use I know of a confidence interval is to have confidence in it"

L. J. Savage, in "The foundations of statistical inference", Methuen, London (1962).
A week ago a meeting was held in Chamonix to discuss in detail the schedule for the near future of the Large Hadron Collider, and to take a decision on the schedule, in particular for 2012.
"Lotteries are a tax on people who are bad at math"

Anonymous
This morning, as I walked out of home headed to work, the sky was clear and still dark. As I looked up, I immediately noticed the bright light of Venus above the houses of Venice. Have you ever watched Venus on a clear morning sky ? It is a marvelous sight! No wonder the planet was named after the most beautiful of all goddesses.

My trip to the University, in Padova, begins with a 7-minute walk to the Venice train station, followed by a 40 minute ride and then a further 15-minute walk in Padova to reach the Physics Department. While on the train I usually busy myself with document editing on my laptop, but on my walks I use to try and put to work the other main CPU I have got - my brain.
Just a quick post today, to show the invariant mass distirbution of pairs of opposite-sign muons collected by the ATLAS and CMS experiment. Such plots are incredibly rich in information, as they contain the signal of ten different resonant states, and allow one to figure out the masses and production rates that these particles have, as well as the resolution of the detectors. I have shown an early such plot by CMS some time ago, but now the graph has been updated to contain all the relevant data collected in 2010 by the detector.