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Toponium Found By CMS!

The highest-mass subnuclear particle ever observed used to the the top quark. Measured for the...

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...

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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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The Quote Of The Week - Zen Moment For a Dark Matter Seeker

The Quote Of The Week - Zen Moment For a Dark Matter Seeker

Mar 21 2013 | comment(s)

"...spend one year one mile underground to stare at a bucket of xenon ... only to come out for your zen moment and profoundly declare "nothing happened" ... and then you spend twice as long wondering how you allowed yourself to be talked into doing that sort of nonsense ... one has to admit to being duped"

Deluded Experimentalist, circa 2013
The Boson Quandary

The Boson Quandary

Mar 19 2013 | comment(s)

Here I vow to never "reblog", but exceptionally I will break that rule, translating from Italian a very nice article recently appeared on the Italian newspaper "Il Sole-24 Ore". The author is the INFN President, Fernando Ferroni. The reason why I break the rule is that the piece is quite clear and many of you may enjoy it. [The article transcript was taken from here]
Neutrino Physics: The Status And The Future Experiments

Neutrino Physics: The Status And The Future Experiments

Mar 15 2013 | comment(s)

The presentations of the last few days at the Neutrino Telescopes conference in Venice allowed me to get to full speed with the developments, new ideas, and new experiments taking data or just in design phase in this fascinating, relatively young field of investigation at the crossroads of particle physics and astrophysics.

The talk slides are online in the conference site, but as usual by just flipping them one usually does not manage to get the most important points. So I am providing summaries of every talk, at the conference blog site.

Yesterday I posted several articles there. Here is a list with links:

- Status of Gerda
Neutel Day 2 Reports

Neutel Day 2 Reports

Mar 14 2013 | comment(s)

Here is a list of the reports of talks given yesterday at the Neutrino Telescope conference in Venice. You should give these a look if you are interested in sterile neutrinos, in the mass hierarchy of neutrinos, or in the phenomenology of neutrinos in general. THe reports are a bit technical and there are at present no figures to complement the text, but figures will be added soon.

- Joachim Kopp: Status of Sterile Neutrino Scenarios

- Michael Cribier: Reactor Antineutrino Anomalies in Europe
Neutel Day 1 Reports

Neutel Day 1 Reports

Mar 13 2013 | comment(s)

Am following the Neutrino Telescope conference in Venice, which started yesterday in the beautiful setting of Palazzo Franchetti. For once I am quite happy to walk to work -different from the usual hour-and-something commute to Padova, where I have my office in the Physics Department. But I am not idle: I have been producing reports of all the talks at the conference, in the conference blog site.

Here is a list of pointers to the talk reports:

- A Tribute to Milla Baldo Ceolin

- Carlo Rubbia: A Millimole of Muons for a Higgs Factory
Higgs Discovery Animation By CMS

Higgs Discovery Animation By CMS

Mar 13 2013 | comment(s)

For the series "ideas worth spreading", CMS has copied the nice idea of ATLAS of producing an animated gif with increasing data leading to the Higgs boson discovery.

This is the mass distribution of Higgs boson candidates, detected by collecting events featuring four charged leptons (electrons or muons). The leptons are combined in pairs, and one pair (of same flavour) will usually yield a mass in the ballpark of the Z boson mass; the other pair will have lower energy if it is produced by an off-shell Z boson. Of course all four-lepton pairs compatible with quality criteria are kept, and the mass distribution thus contains a majority of events due to standard model production of ZZ pairs. This is the peaking background at masses above 180 GeV.