Physics

Narsky And Porter: A Nice Review Of Analysis Techniques

I received yesterday a copy of the brand-new book by Ilya Narsky and Frank Porter, "Statistical Analysis Techniques in Particle Physics" (Wiley-vch 2014), and I would like to offer here my impressions and thoughts on the material. ...

Article - Tommaso Dorigo - Jan 31 2014 - 4:39am

Atlas Sees No Light From Quantum Black Holes

Black holes are all the rage these days, with theorists arguing about firewalls and Hawking's paper being handled by the press in rather improper ways. Meanwhile at the Large Hadron Collider ATLAS and CMS are furthering their searches for microscopic ...

Article - Tommaso Dorigo - Feb 3 2014 - 10:30am

February 1996: A Media Storm Hits CDF

On January 25th 1996 the CDF collaboration submitted for publication to Physical Review Letters  the result of their measurement of the rate of jet production as a function of jet transverse energy, performed on 20 inverse picobarns of data collected by th ...

Article - Tommaso Dorigo - Feb 4 2014 - 6:44am

First Principles, Hydrogen And Heavy Metal In The Early Cosmos

First principles are calculations that rely on established mathematical laws of nature without additional assumptions or special models. But when it comes to the early universe, what are those first principles? We're talking really ab initio- "f ...

Article - News Staff - Feb 5 2014 - 3:38pm

Particle Physics For High School Students

Yesterday I visited a high school in Treviso, a small centre in north-west Italy. The students of the last two years participate in a program called "masterclasses" which includes lessons on particle physics and astrophysics and a visit to the de ...

Blog Post - Tommaso Dorigo - Feb 15 2014 - 9:59am

Advanced Sensitivity To New Physics From Event Deconstruction

A new paper by Davison Soper and Michael Spannowsky has been sent to the Cornell preprint ArXiv last week. It proposes a new technique to reconstruct the decay of heavy particles within hadronic jets, and shows how this can improve the sensitivity to heavy ...

Article - Tommaso Dorigo - Feb 17 2014 - 5:02am

Higgs Decays To Z-Gamma Pairs: The Next Challenge

The ATLAS collaboration at the Large Hadron Collider, CERN's 8-TeV proton-proton collider now being recommissioned to run at the close-to-design energy of 13 TeV in 2015, has published a few days ago on the Cornell ArXiv the result of a search for Hig ...

Article - Tommaso Dorigo - Feb 17 2014 - 1:06pm

Strangelet Fear-Mongering And Death By Review

I believe I am not alone in being fascinated by the ongoing debates about this or that physics experiment being on the verge of destroying the Earth. Microscopic black holes produced by mistake in particle physics experiments sinking down to the center of ...

Article - Tommaso Dorigo - Feb 18 2014 - 10:24am

LUX Confirms It Has Not Found Dark Matter

In the 'sometimes what you don't find can be important too' department, a new high-accuracy calibration of the LUX (Large Underground Xenon) dark matter detector's sensitivity to ultra-low energy events strongly confirms the result tha ...

Article - News Staff - Feb 20 2014 - 1:35pm

Massive Neutrinos Resolve A Major Problem With The Standard Model Of Cosmology

Recent Planck spacecraft observations of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) – the fading glow of the Big Bang – have highlighted a discrepancy between cosmological results and  predictions from other types of observations. The CMB is the oldest light in ...

Article - News Staff - Feb 21 2014 - 6:30am