Two days ago I wrote here about the projected reach of Higgs boson searches of the Tevatron experiments, discussing what can be seen by CDF and D0 if they combine their analyses results, after improving them as is today thought possible to do. The reach was shown as a function of the integrated luminosity, which allows one to infer what can be done if the Tevatron stops running in 2011 or, as is being proposed, it continues for a few more years.

Last Tuesday I presented new precise Tevatron results on top quark physics at the "LHC Days" conference in Split. The top-quark measurements that CDF and DZERO have produced with their multi-inverse-femtobarn datasets of proton-antiproton collisions are very precise, and they surpass pre-Run-II expectations: suffices to say that the top-quark mass is now estimated with a 0.61% uncertainty, over twice smaller than promised. So it was nice to display these results to an audience mainly composed of LHC colleagues. I received several questions and the interest in my talk was clear.

I am spending a few pleasant days in Split for the conference "LHC Days". I will be representing the D0 and CDF collaborations here in a talk on top physics at the Tevatron; in the meantime, I am pleased to witness that talks are of high quality. This morning the most interesting to listen to (at least to me) was the one by Guido Altarelli, a distinguished theorist from the University of Roma III. Altarelli has given crucial contributions to the advancement of our understanding of Quantum Chromo-Dynamics in the seventies, and it is always a pleasure to listen to him (a previous report of a talk he gave in Perugia two years ago is here).

I will be attending next week to a conference in Split (Croatia). The conference is titled "LHC Days", and has the purpose of bringing together experimental physicists working at the main CERN experiments with theorists and experimentalists from all over the world, to discuss the current status and the future perspectives of research in particle physics, focusing of course on the Large Hadron Collider at CERN.

Georges Charpak, a French physicist and 1992 Nobel Prize winner, died yesterday.

Of Polish origin, Charpak gave crucial contributions to experimental physics, in particular for his invention of the multiwire proportional chamber in 1968.

Back then, the signal of passage of charged particles was recorded by bubble chamber images and images triggered by spark chambers - where the charge deposition would create a discharge in a very high electric field.