Physics

And CMS, In The Meantime...

Earlier today I reported about the publication of a paper by a non-professional physicist, Carl Brannen. Now I have to do the same for a paper-the first one in a long and groundbreaking series, you can bet- from the CMS collaboration, one of the two main e ...

Blog Post - Tommaso Dorigo - Feb 7 2010 - 11:23am

The Physics Of Love

Jim Croce, whose major was psychology in Villanova University, perhaps, had a minor in physics, I don't know, when he graduated in 1965. His song " Time in a Bottle"  conjures physics of love, right? So, if there is chemistry of love, then t ...

Blog Post - Hatice Cullingford - Feb 9 2010 - 11:18am

The New Harmonic Oscillator

A lot of my sophomore year in astronomy was spent solving harmonic oscillator problems.  A harmonic oscillator is something that moves with a periodic motion—say, a pendulum swinging or a mass on a spring sliding back and forth.  Students of physics and as ...

Blog Post - Camille M. Carlisle - Feb 9 2010 - 9:42pm

Higgs Seminar For Sale

This afternoon I am leaving to Belgium. I have been invited by the Université Catholique de Louvain to give a seminar on the status and the future of the Higgs boson searches at the Tevatron collider. This was a good pretext to sit down and learn the lates ...

Blog Post - Tommaso Dorigo - Feb 10 2010 - 5:43am

Constraints On The Higgs Mass From The Muon Anomaly

One of the positive side-effects of preparing a seminar is being forced to get up-to-date with the latest experimental and theoretical developments on the topic. And this is of particular benefit to lazy bums like myself, who prefer to spend their time pla ...

Article - Tommaso Dorigo - Feb 15 2010 - 12:44am

The Quote Of The Week: The Pre-Discovery Of The Anomalous Magnetic Moment

"In 1934, L.E.Kinsler at the California Institute of technology was studying the Zeeman effect as a means for evaluating the charge-to-mass ratio of the electron, e/m. The deduction of e/m from the measured wavelength differences involves, in addition ...

Blog Post - Tommaso Dorigo - Feb 15 2010 - 11:35am

Who Pooed On My Plot? The Evolution Of Scatology In Data Visualization

I remember very well the very first meeting of the Heavy Flavour Working Group in CDF that I attended in the summer of 1992. I was a summer student back then, and my understanding of spoken English was not perfect, so as a graduate student started discussi ...

Blog Post - Tommaso Dorigo - Feb 17 2010 - 6:06am

Precession of Mercury’s Orbit

The phenomenon, by which perihelion of elliptical orbital path of a planet appears to rotate around a central body, is known as the precession of the orbital path. Since the precession of mercury’s orbital path is much greater, compared to the precession o ...

Blog Post - Nainan Varghese - Mar 1 2010 - 10:02am

Smart Students in Bassano

It has become a pleasant habit for me to visit Bassano del Grappa every February for a conference on particle physics aimed at high-school students. Thanks to the efforts and the skill of dr. Sergio Lucisano, the schools of Bassano organize every year seve ...

Blog Post - Tommaso Dorigo - Feb 19 2010 - 4:54am

Are Quarks And Leptons Elementary Or Composite?

There are twenty-four elementary fermions in the standard model. Sure, they are arranged in a very tidy, symmetrical structure of three families of eight fermions (two leptons and six quarks), which is not too unpleasant to behold. And of course, if one is ...

Article - Tommaso Dorigo - Feb 25 2010 - 3:53pm