A routine check of the hep-ex preprints in the Cornell Arxiv revealed today some interesting papers worth giving a look. At least, they are interesting to me: don't expect me to publicize stuff I do not understand or care about! Also, I should mention that many more interesting papers are daily produced, but one cannot really follow everything...
So here is a short list with minimal commentary, for those of you willing to expand your knowledge with a half hour of paper browsing.
This morning I read with interest
a paper on Physics Today, titled "
Communicating the Science of Climate Change", by R. Somerville and S. Hassol. In it, there is a table worth pondering about. Here it is:
October is passing and the neutrino saga continues to make headlines here and there, but I know that the excitement is bound to slowly dampen, as the preprint claiming superluminal speeds ages in the Arxiv without being sent to a scientific magazine.
I was happy to see today a very nice piece discussing the Opera result on allegedly superluminal motion of muon neutrinos, written by Paolo Ciafaloni, a colleague from Lecce University. The piece is in Italian, so you either know the language or need to revert to google translate or some other web resource in order to make sense of it. But the nice thing is that Paolo is caressing the idea of writing a blog of his own, and maybe in English - maybe for Science 2.0 .
The saga of the superluminal neutrinos took a dramatic turn today, with the publication of a
very simple yet definitive study by ICARUS, another neutrino experiment at the Gran Sasso Laboratories, who has looked at the neutrinos shot from CERN since 2010.
Higgs boson hunters often catch themselves dreaming of the boson having a mass high enough to give rise to the spectacular decay into two Z bosons, and then four charged leptons in the final state. At a hadron collider -let's talk of the LHC to be specific- such a signature is the only one providing events which, once properly selected, are more likely signal than background.
The situation of observing an event display being able to tell for sure what it represents, among the infinite possibilities and the intrinsic indetermination of quantum processes, is reassuring and gives a physicist a feeling of power. God did not play dice this time: those two are 100% Z bosons, and their combined mass is exactly the one of the Higgs.
A Great Year For Experiment Design
Living At The Polar Circle
Conferences Good And Bad, In A Profit-Driven Society
USERN: 10 Years Of Non-Profit Action Supporting Science Education And Research
