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Holiday Chess Riddle

During Christmas holidays I tend to indulge in online chess playing a bit too much, wasting several...

Why Measure The Top Quark Production Cross Section?

As part of my self-celebrations for XX years of blogging activities, I am reposting here (very)...

The Buried Lottery

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Twenty years ago today I got access for the first time to the interface that allowed me to publish...

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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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I believe I am not alone in being fascinated by the ongoing debates about this or that physics experiment being on the verge of destroying the Earth. Microscopic black holes produced by mistake in particle physics experiments sinking down to the center of the Earth and slowly eating us out, small black holes used as "clean" bombs, antimatter weapons, strange-matter bits gradually engulfing everything around.

It is quite entertaining and it would be even good for physics outreach if spun the right way, but unfortunately we should not trust too much the sense of humour of our political leaders.
The fifth international school of Science Journalism will be held in the small town of Erice, in Sicily (Italy) between June 9th and 14th. The event is organized by the INFN, and I wish to publicize it here also because I will give a contribution there.

The general theme of the school this years is "The Digital World: Computing, Networks, and Us". From the "About" tab in the conference site:
The ATLAS collaboration at the Large Hadron Collider, CERN's 8-TeV proton-proton collider now being recommissioned to run at the close-to-design energy of 13 TeV in 2015, has published a few days ago on the Cornell ArXiv the result of a search for Higgs bosons decaying to Zγ pairs.
A new paper by Davison Soper and Michael Spannowsky has been sent to the Cornell preprint ArXiv last week. It proposes a new technique to reconstruct the decay of heavy particles within hadronic jets, and shows how this can improve the sensitivity to heavy new particles by studying in particular the case of a heavy Z' boson decaying to boosted top quark pairs. I believe the technique is very interesting and I will try to give a few impressions of it here; before I do, let me introduce the topic for outsiders.
Yesterday I visited a high school in Treviso, a small centre in north-west Italy. The students of the last two years participate in a program called "masterclasses" which includes lessons on particle physics and astrophysics and a visit to the department of Physics in Padova, where they will be taught how to distinguish particle decays using real LHC data.
On January 25th 1996 the CDF collaboration submitted for publication to Physical Review Letters  the result of their measurement of the rate of jet production as a function of jet transverse energy, performed on 20 inverse picobarns of data collected by the experiment in the 1992-93 run of the Tevatron collider. That measurement deviated at its high-energy tail from predictions of quantum chromodynamics, suggesting that the underlying model -and most likely, the parton distribution functions (PDF) which describe the probability of finding partons with given fractions of their parent momentum- was at fault.