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A Great Year For Experiment Design

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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 Highest-Energy Cosmic Rays From Auger

The Highest-Energy Cosmic Rays From Auger

May 22 2010 | comment(s)

I read with pleasure today a proceedings writeup of the Moriond 2010 talk given by S. Andringa on behalf of the Pierre Auger Observatory. It is too bad that I did not visit La Thuile this year: the venue of the Moriond conferences is always a very pleasant place to spend a week, with talks scheduled in the morning and evening which leave the central hours of the day free for skiing. My last trip there was in 2005: I need to make the case for another visit next year!
The Quote Of The Week - Electroweak Unification

The Quote Of The Week - Electroweak Unification

May 21 2010 | comment(s)

"Leptons interact only with photons, and with the intermediate bosons that presumably mediate weak interactions. What could be more natural than to unite these spin-one bosons into a multiplet of gauge fields ? Standing in the way of this synthesis are the obvious differences in the masses of the photon and the intermediate (boson), and in their couplings. We might hope to understand these differences by imagining that the symmetries relating the weak and electromagnetic interactions are exact symmetries of the Lagrangian but are broken by the vacuum".

Steven Weinberg
Paper Sent!!!!!!!!

Paper Sent!!!!!!!!

May 19 2010 | comment(s)

Finally, the Bose-Einstein Correlations article by CMS to which I have personally contributed during the last few months is now an arxiv entry, and has been sent to Physical Review Letters. This is a success for the CMS collaboration, since we are the first to measure this effect in the new LHC proton-proton collisions, at 0.9 and 2.36 TeV of center-of-mass energy.
The Plot Of The Week - News On CP Violation

The Plot Of The Week - News On CP Violation

May 18 2010 | comment(s)

If you follow the blogosphere as a source of information on cutting-edge high-energy-physics results, you certainly by now know that the DZERO collaboration has produced a new exciting result. They find a 3.2 standard deviation effect in a study of charge asymmetry of muon pairs, which can be due to a unexpected, large source of CP violation -one which constitutes a very good shot at explaining the origin of the matter-antimatter asymmetry of the Universe!
A Dispensable Discovery

A Dispensable Discovery

May 15 2010 | comment(s)

While around the world particle physicists are working frantically to produce important new results to be shown at ICHEP 2010 -the International Conference on High-Energy Physics, which is held every two years and is arguably the single most important meeting for this branch of science-, new discoveries get claimed in an asynchronous way. And some of them in a very asynchronous way, I should say, since they are based on 40-years-old data.
Scientists, Ye Pedantic Jerks

Scientists, Ye Pedantic Jerks

May 13 2010 | comment(s)

Academics pay a lot of attention to the quality of their writings. It is generally a point of pride to publish flawless documents, and this is felt in scientific disciplines just as much as in literary ones. If I told you how much time the members of a scientific experiment such as CDF at the Tevatron or CMS at CERN (the ones I work in) spend in the review of their articles before these are sent to the publishers, you would be startled.