Physics

Hey AI, Design A Calorimeter For Me

As artificial intelligence tools continue to evolve and improve their performance on more and more general tasks, scientists struggle to make the best use of them.  The problem is not incompetence- in fact, at least in my field of study (high-energy physic ...

Article - Tommaso Dorigo - Feb 5 2025 - 1:24pm

The Great Neutrino Tsunami

February 23rd 1987 is a day indelibly imprinted on the minds of everyone interested in astrophysics. At 7:36 GMT that day, now 25 years ago, the big one hit us. There was no escape. For 13 seconds a tsunami of neutrinos, emanating from a giant star eleven ...

Article - Johannes Koelman - Feb 7 2025 - 1:39pm

Unsupervised Tracking

Pattern recognition is an altisonant name to a rather common, if complex, activity we perform countless times in our daily lives. Our brain is capable of interpreting successions of sounds, written symbols, or images almost infallibly- so much so that peop ...

Article - Tommaso Dorigo - Feb 11 2025 - 12:24pm

KM3NeT: Most Energetic Neutrino In The Universe Detected

The  Kilometre Cubic Neutrino Telescope (KM3NeT) collaboration has reported detection of  a neutrino with an estimated energy of about 220 PeV (220 million billion electron volts) by its ARCA detector. The event, KM3-230213A, is the first evidence that neu ...

Article - News Staff - Feb 12 2025 - 10:00am

The Probability Density Function: A Known Unknown

Perhaps the most important thing to get right from the start, in most statistical problems, is to understand what is the probability distribution function (PDF) of your data. If you know it exactly-something that is theoretically possible but only rarely a ...

Article - Tommaso Dorigo - Mar 19 2025 - 11:44am

The Analogy: A Powerful Instrument For Physics Outreach

About a month ago I was contacted by a colleague who invited me to write a piece on the topic of science outreach for an electronic journal (Ithaca). I was happy to accept, but when I later pondered on what I would have liked to write, I could not help thi ...

Article - Tommaso Dorigo - Mar 21 2025 - 9:46am

Interna

In the past few years my activities on this site- but I would say more in general, as the same pattern happened also on social media- have progressively shifted away from pure casual blogging and reporting of personal matters to a more focused discussion o ...

Blog Post - Tommaso Dorigo - Mar 29 2025 - 5:09am

Toponium Found By CMS!

The highest-mass subnuclear particle ever observed used to the the top quark. Measured for the first time by the CDF experiment in 1994, and subsequently confirmed by CDF and D0 in 1995, the top quark is the heaviest elementary particle we know of, and it ...

Article - Tommaso Dorigo - Apr 10 2025 - 4:09pm