Physics

I am spending the week in the pleasant resort of La Biodola, in the Elba island. Elba is a beautiful island just off the coast of Tuscany. Here Napoleon was exiled after his abdication in 1814 (he arrived here on May 30th). Exactly 200 years later, 100 Ita ...

Article - Tommaso Dorigo - May 23 2014 - 3:34am

Higgs Classification Challenge Status

I reported here a few days ago about a very nice challenge issued by the ATLAS experiment: find Higgs boson decays to tau lepton pairs in a sample containing signal as well as background events, using a training sample with correct signal and background la ...

Article - Tommaso Dorigo - May 27 2014 - 4:56am

The Plot Of The Week- The Source Of Higgs Bosons

One of the nice details lost in the big picture of the Higgs boson discovery of 2012 is that a significant part of the signal put in evidence by ATLAS and CMS is produced by a very special kind of interactions between the protons accelerated by the LHC. Th ...

Article - Tommaso Dorigo - May 29 2014 - 9:58am

The Quote Of The Week- How Quarks Came To Be Accepted

"After the 1974 London Conference, with its strong confirmation of the quark model, a general change of view developed with regard to the structure of hadrons. [...] the quark structure of hadrons became the dominant view for developing theory and pl ...

Blog Post - Tommaso Dorigo - May 30 2014 - 6:55am

BICEP2 and gravitational waves, a question of foreground.

They key issues in the discussion of the BICEP2 result center around the way BICEP2 accounted for dust in the foreground. They based their analysis on a presentation graphic which was shown at the April APS conference of 2013. This may have been a mistak ...

Blog Post - Hontas Farmer - Jun 2 2014 - 10:58pm

Magnetic-Flux Ropes: A Hidden Source Of Solar Surges

Observations with the 1.6-meter telescope at Big Bear Solar Observatory (BBSO) in California, the most powerful ground-based instrument dedicated to studying the Sun, have resulted in the highest- resolution solar observations ever made. ...

Article - News Staff - Jun 4 2014 - 1:00am

Nearest Neighbors: An Algorithm You Know

You are the first to arrive to a dinner party and must choose the table where to sit, relying on your past experience of how handsome members of the opposite sex (you're straight) usually choose their seat. You need to buy stocks based on past perform ...

Article - Tommaso Dorigo - Jun 4 2014 - 10:53pm

Please Fasten Your Hypothetical Seatbelts, Black Hole Gravity Is About To Get Conjecturally Bumpy

If you’re flying in the vicinity of a black hole, seatbelts and a bumpy ride are really the least of your concerns, but we are in the world of the hypothetical, and the accepted wisdom among gravitational thinkers has been that spacetime cannot become turb ...

Article - News Staff - Jun 5 2014 - 6:35pm

Answer To Where Are The Parallel Worlds

Space seems like an empty box that lives through time. This can already be classified as a “better model”, as you can see in the table below. However, this tacitly held model makes people wonder: If I toss a coin and find myself with the result being “tai ...

Article - Sascha Vongehr - Jun 7 2014 - 9:32am

Quarks In Six Packs- Exotic Particle Confirmed

For decades, physicists have searched for exotic bound states comprising more than three quarks. In 2011, over 120 scientists from eight countries discovered strong indications for the existence of an exotic dibaryon made up of six quarks. Now, experiment ...

Article - News Staff - Jun 6 2014 - 10:59am