Physics
- Systematic Uncertainties: The Heart Of The Matter In Physics Measurement
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Experimental physics is about investigating the world in a quantitative manner, by exploiting our technology to carefully map the wealth of phenomena that make planets turn around stars, atoms stick together, and hearts to beat. All of that can be understo ...
Article - Tommaso Dorigo - Jul 22 2020 - 8:42am
- The Cosmic Microwave Background From Harmonic Oscillators? Maybe.
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U nification of General Relativity with Quantum Field Theory is the greatest mystery of physics, the holy grail of theoretical physics, and also a graveyard of theories. Everyone who has chosen has chosen poorly so far. Working on this problem from anothe ...
Blog Post - Hontas Farmer - Jul 27 2020 - 10:59am
- Higgs Decay To Muons: CMS Wins The Race
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As of late we have been scratching the barrel of "straightforward" measurements of the properties of the Higgs boson, the particle discovered in 2012 by the Large Hadron Collider ATLAS and CMS experiments. But the one property determined in the m ...
Article - Tommaso Dorigo - Aug 3 2020 - 9:36am
- Twistors: A New Direction For A Unified Theory
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What is a twistor, and why should we care? Well, I may not be the most qualified blogger out here to give you an answer, but I will try to at least give you an idea. Before I do, though, maybe first of all I should say why I am discussing here a rather obs ...
Article - Tommaso Dorigo - Aug 16 2020 - 1:28pm
- Assholery In Academia
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Have you ever behaved like an a**hole? Or did you ever have the impulse to do so? Did you ever use your position, your status, your authority to please yourself by crushing some ego? Please answer this in good faith to yourself- nobody is looking behind yo ...
Article - Tommaso Dorigo - Aug 18 2020 - 6:20pm
- A New Method For Muon Energy Measurement In A Granular Calorimeter
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Muons are very special particles. They are charged particles that obey the same physical laws and interaction phenomenology of electrons, but their 207 times heavier mass (105 MeV, versus the half MeV of electrons) makes them behave in an entirely differen ...
Article - Tommaso Dorigo - Aug 26 2020 - 2:20pm
- The Hunt For A Cool Rare Decay Of W Bosons
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W bosons, what are they? To answer this question, let me first tell you that our world is made of matter held together by forces. If you look deep within, you will realize that matter is essentially constituted by "fermions": quarks and leptons, ...
Article - Tommaso Dorigo - Sep 23 2020 - 11:52am
- How To Murder A Quasiparticle
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In large systems of interacting particles in quantum mechanics, groups of particles can begin to behave like single particles. Physicists refer to such groups of particles as quasiparticles and while they live, they are useful in helping us understand supe ...
Article - News Staff - Sep 28 2020 - 10:32am
- Those Rare Decays Of Kaons
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Particle Physics deals with the study of the elementary constituents of matter, and the interactions that they withstand. When non-insiders hear of elementary particles and the experiments that study them, probably their mind goes to experiments at the Lar ...
Article - Tommaso Dorigo - Oct 1 2020 - 8:30am
- Five Tips For Particle Physics PhD Students, Reloaded
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For some reason today I remembered that 11 years ago (wow time flies) I wrote a two-parts piece on advices for PhD students doing a thesis in experimental particle physics. As I checked it out, I found that I mostly share the views I had back then (TBH th ...
Article - Tommaso Dorigo - Oct 8 2020 - 5:42pm