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A Great Year For Experiment Design

While 2025 will arguably not be remembered as a very positive year for humankind, for many reasons...

Living At The Polar Circle

Since 2022, when I got invited for a keynote talk at a Deep Learning school, I have been visiting...

Conferences Good And Bad, In A Profit-Driven Society

Nowadays researchers and scholars of all ages and specialization find themselves struggling with...

USERN: 10 Years Of Non-Profit Action Supporting Science Education And Research

The 10th congress of the USERN organization was held on November 8-10 in Campinas, Brazil. Some...

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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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CP Violation In D Mesons: New Physics Or Standard Physics ?

CP Violation In D Mesons: New Physics Or Standard Physics ?

Apr 23 2013 | comment(s)

One of the most intriguing effects in subatomic physics is the phenomenon of violation of the discrete symmetry called "CP". It is intriguing at various levels.

First of all, CP violation is intriguing because of the depth of the concept: proof of that be that it is not at all easy to explain it to outsiders (I will make an attempt below, but I am likely to fail!).

Second, its elusive nature makes it even more mysterious and difficult to study: only a few subatomic physical systems exhibit it, and the effect is visible only as a modification of measurable quantities at the level of a few parts in a thousand.
The Quote Of The Week - G.H.Hardy, Second-Rate Minds

The Quote Of The Week - G.H.Hardy, Second-Rate Minds

Apr 18 2013 | comment(s)

"It is a melancholy experience for a professional mathematician to find himself writing about mathematics. The function of a mathematician is to do something, to prove new theorems, to add to mathematics, and not to talk about what he or other mathematicians have done. Statesmen despise publicists, painters despise art-critics, and physiologists, physicists, or mathematicians have usually similar feelings: there is no scorn more profound, or on the whole more justifiable, than that of the men who make for the men who explain.
Faulty Particle Infographics - Do Not Distribute!

Faulty Particle Infographics - Do Not Distribute!

Apr 14 2013 | comment(s)

Pictures showing the structure of matter and the organization of subatomic particles in different categories abound. Indeed, cataloging and classifying entities subject of study is a powerful means of grasping their essence and infer their properties. The most striking example I can offer is the Mendeleev table of elements (which allowed its creator to spectacularly deduce the existence of elements not yet discovered); but there are many others, like the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram of star classification, or the one for galaxies, or the cataloging of animal species...
A Sense Of Scale

A Sense Of Scale

Apr 10 2013 | comment(s)

There have been other attempts in the past, so this is not strictly a new idea. However I found the interactive web page at http://htwins.net/scale2/ extremely well constructed.

It is a graphical display of the largest and smallest structures from galaxy superclusters down to quarks and the Planck length. By moving a scroll bar left or right, you can get a very clear sense of scale of the different things. And in so doing you learn the relative size of different objects, from planets to stars, or from stars to galaxies; or vice-versa, from cells to molecules and atoms.

I highly recommend it!
Sterile Neutrinos: Toward A Clarifying Experiment

Sterile Neutrinos: Toward A Clarifying Experiment

Apr 09 2013 | comment(s)

Now that the Higgs has been found, the current hype in popular science magazines suggests that the most pressing question in fundamental physics research is whether new particles will be found at the Large Hadron Collider: Is Supersymmetry the right extension of the standard model? Or are there new extra dimensions of space-time ? Can microscopic black holes be created in particle collisions ? I think all of you have heard some of these questions enough times by now.
11 Electron Neutrinos In T2K!

11 Electron Neutrinos In T2K!

Apr 04 2013 | comment(s)

The T2K Collaboration released today an analysis of their data in the Cornell Arxiv. T2K searches for electron neutrinos appearing in a muon neutrino beam produced by the J-PARC accelerator facility in Tokai-Mura, using a near detector located 280 meters downstream of the proton target, and a far detector (SuperKamiokande) at 295 km from the source.

The appearance of electron neutrinos in a muon neutrino beam is a very important oscillation signal of neutrinos, that allows the measurement of the parameter theta_13, one of the so far less-well known parameter of the neutrino mixing matrix.