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A Great Year For Experiment Design

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Living At The Polar Circle

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

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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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The Say Of The Week

The Say Of The Week

Sep 05 2010 | comment(s)

"Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation."

Oscar Wilde
Aftermath Of A Rumor

Aftermath Of A Rumor

Sep 04 2010 | comment(s)

Back to breathing the air of Fermilab after a full year away, I got to gauge a bit better the aftermath of the little incident created by a posting of mine in July. As often happens with internet bubbles, they look quite dramatic as they inflate, but they leave no big scars. Two months have passed, and this looks like a good time to post here some ruminations about the general issue.

Physics Experiments And Confidentiality
Another Week On Shift For CDF

Another Week On Shift For CDF

Sep 03 2010 | comment(s)

Since today, and for a full week, I will be serving as Scientific Coordinator (SciCo) of the crew operating the CDF experiment at Fermilab. This honorable task (or in alternative, the serving as "Consumer Operator" or "ACE") is required to all collaborators once or twice per year, in order to provide 24/7 operation of the detector and supervision of the data-taking activities.

The crew is formed by a SciCo, a CO, and an ACE.
What Can You Do With A Million Z Bosons ?

What Can You Do With A Million Z Bosons ?

Aug 30 2010 | comment(s)

A new paper produced by the DZERO collaboration got me quite interested today, for several reasons. The analysis is based on a large data sample: over seven inverse femtobarns of proton-antiproton collisions! This is a huge dataset, the result of about 500 trillion proton-antiproton collisions! In fact, the measurement these data has made possible is extremely precise and it exposes quite strikingly the shortcomings of our present modeling of the production of vector bosons.
Another Sheep Back In The Yard - The Late NuTeV Anomaly

Another Sheep Back In The Yard - The Late NuTeV Anomaly

Aug 27 2010 | comment(s)

The Standard Model of particle physics has been under attack since its original formulation, in 1967, and yet it has so far resisted every assault; in so doing it has become one of the most thoroughly tested physical theories. Like it or not, the construction has stood the test of time so well that theorists and experimentalists alike feel threatened by the chance that the Large Hadron Collider, too, will fail to find new physics beyond what the model predicts.
Ask Questions!

Ask Questions!

Aug 24 2010 | comment(s)

Last week in Tesero, in front of an audience of 150 interested laypersons, I spoke about the marvels of particle physics (the poster of the conference I gave is below, click to enlarge). My first slide made clear what  I believe is the most important gift of a researcher -theorist or experimentalist- in fundamental science: