Physics

The Subtle Art Of Bump Hunting- Part I

If you have recently given a close enough look at the search results that the CDF and DZERO experiments have been producing at a regular pace on the Higgs boson- every six months, that is: for summer and winter conferences- and your exposure to particle ph ...

Article - Tommaso Dorigo - Apr 27 2009 - 11:36am

Hans Bethe Lectures to His Retirement Community Colleagues

I stumbled on this amazing set of videos: physics legend Hans Bethe giving lectures on theoretical physics to his retirement community neighbors. It's not as crazy as it sounds- a running joke around Ithaca (where I grew up and where Bethe's univ ...

Blog Post - Michael White - Apr 20 2009 - 8:22pm

Bump Hunting II: The Greedy Bump Bias

Here is the concluding part (for the first part see here) of a discussion of a few subtleties involved in the extraction of small new particle signals hiding within large backgrounds. This is a quite common problem arising in data analysis at particle phys ...

Article - Tommaso Dorigo - Apr 27 2009 - 11:57pm

Spooky Action's Quantum Ghosts

The idea that far distant particles can somehow 'talk' to each other led Einstein to call it 'spooky action at a distance'. Having confirmed its existence, scientists today are learning how to use this 'spooky action' as a hel ...

Article - News Staff - Apr 27 2009 - 10:02am

Source code for the greedy bump bias

A comment in the thread under my recent post on the greedy bump bias stimulates me to provide here idiot-proof instructions on how to study the effect by yourself, if you wish to spend your time this way. In fact, if I provide you with a simple piece of co ...

Blog Post - Tommaso Dorigo - Apr 28 2009 - 3:35am

HERA's Intriguing Top Candidates

These are hard times for evil guys like me, who are always willing to speculate wildly on particle physics results-only to secretly chuckle at the ripples their extrapolations make, knowing for a fact that the Standard Model is as solid as it has ever been ...

Article - Tommaso Dorigo - Apr 29 2009 - 10:13pm

The Large Hadron Collider is Back Together

2008 was a horrible year for the Large Hadron Collider. Just nine days after an extremely successful, highly publicized start-up on September 10th, when hundreds of reporters gathered at CERN to follow the protons as they ventured sector by sector to manag ...

Blog Post - Tommaso Dorigo - Apr 30 2009 - 3:09pm

Four Things About Four Generations

Triggered by a preprint appeared three days ago on the ArXiV-a fundamental resource for particle physicists willing to stay in touch with the latest developments of the theory and new experimental results-  this morning I was gearing up to write a post wit ...

Article - Tommaso Dorigo - May 3 2009 - 5:34pm

Fermi Sifts Through 'Cosmic Wreckage' For Dark Matter

NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, launched June 2008, has certainly started its career with a (big) bang, discovering a new class of pulsars and watching flaring jets in galaxies billions of light-years away. Now it's going after another co ...

Article - News Staff - May 4 2009 - 10:17pm

A Lesser Jet-Flying Clown Than Rubbia

The job of experimental particle physicist is strongly correlated with worldwide travel. Paid for and self-inflicted, sure. But not exactly always pleasant, nor to exotic destinations. In fact, experimental facilities are usually located in notably un-fanc ...

Blog Post - Tommaso Dorigo - May 24 2011 - 9:42am