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The Problem With Peer Review

In a world where misinformation, voluntary or accidental, reigns supreme; in a world where lies...

Interna

In the past few years my activities on this site - but I would say more in general, as the same...

The Probability Density Function: A Known Unknown

Perhaps the most important thing to get right from the start, in most statistical problems, is...

Summer Lectures In AI

Winter is not over yet, but I am already busy fixing the details of some conferences, schools,...

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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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More Confirmations On Y(4140) And Y(4270) From BaBar

More Confirmations On Y(4140) And Y(4270) From BaBar

Feb 24 2014 | comment(s)

The Y(4140) state, a resonance found in decays of the B meson to J/ψ φ K final states, is the protagonist of a long saga. Originally it was obseved by CDF in 4 inverse femtobarns of Run 2 data by Kai Yi, a very active "bump hunter" in the experiment - and I want to add, a successful one! 

Kai had to withstand a very long review process within the collaboration before the evidence for the new particle could finally be published; and the addition of more data to the analysis, one year afterwards, left many in CDF with the suspect that the particle was maybe there only in the eye of the beholder: the new data did not seem to show a clear hint of the peak seen in the first part.
Strangelet Fear-Mongering And Death By Review

Strangelet Fear-Mongering And Death By Review

Feb 18 2014 | comment(s)

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 2014 Erice School of Science Journalism

The 2014 Erice School of Science Journalism

Feb 17 2014 | comment(s)

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:
Higgs Decays To Z-Gamma Pairs: The Next Challenge

Higgs Decays To Z-Gamma Pairs: The Next Challenge

Feb 16 2014 | comment(s)

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.
Advanced Sensitivity To New Physics From Event Deconstruction

Advanced Sensitivity To New Physics From Event Deconstruction

Feb 11 2014 | comment(s)

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.
Particle Physics For High School Students

Particle Physics For High School Students

Feb 06 2014 | comment(s)

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.