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

As part of my self-celebrations for having survived 20 years of blogging (the anniversary was a...

Twenty Years Blogging

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

Tommaso Dorigo

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 »

Why Quarks Come In Three Colours And Have Fractional Charge

Sep 11 2012 | comment(s)

It sometimes happens that my comments in the threads of my own blog get long and detailed (do not take this as me boasting about anything - it is just a fact). When that happens, I reason that they deserve to be promoted to a post by themselves, because threads are read by way fewer readers, and some of them might thus lose some interesting bit.

Because of the above I am (re)posting the text below, which explains some "a priori" reasons why quarks come with fractional electric charges in multiples of one third, why the sum of charges of fermions in one family nullify, and why our universe chose to have quarks of three colours. Beware, some non-trivial concepts of quantum field theory are needed, but I will try to make this as painless as possible (but not more).

Multiverse: A Religion ?

Sep 10 2012 | comment(s)

Last Saturday night Gian Francesco Giudice and I discussed the discovery of the Higgs boson and its aftermath in front of a wide audience gathered in the Aula Magna of Mantova University.

The event was #173 in the wide program of the town's literature festival, a week of seminars, interviews, performances by authors of books, journalists, and intellectuals in a broader sense.

5 Sigma: Writeup For Festivaletteratura

Sep 05 2012 | comment(s)

On Friday evening I will be talking in the wonderful Piazza Mantegna, in downtown Mantova (see picture below). It is an event organized by Festivaletteratura (literature festival), where I will be armed with blackboard and chalks, plus a mike, and where I will explain the way a discovery of a new particle comes about.

On Saturday instead I will be at the aula magna of the Mantova University, where in company with Gian Francesco Giudice (a CERN theorist) I will discuss the Higgs boson discovery and the aftermath. That is a more "serious" event and we will be discussing in front of a paying audience. I hear that the event is already sold out, so it will (should) be interesting!

CMS Week in Lisbon

Sep 03 2012 | comment(s)

Large collaborations of physicists have a consolidated habit of meeting three or four times per year for a full week of discussions and talks. This has multiple purposes, one of them being the possibility to bring together members who live and work off-site (which may mean several thousand miles away from CERN). So, to alleviate a little the lab-centered life of experiments, one of these events every year is typically held away from the lab, in the site of one of the institutions participating in the experiment.

The Plot Of The Week - New SUSY Limits From ATLAS

Sep 01 2012 | comment(s)

A new ATLAS search for supersymmetric signatures in 2011 LHC data has appeared last week in the arxiv. The result ? No hint of a signal, not even for ready money.

So if you are on a hurry, you can just have a glance at the graph below, which summarizes the measurement in terms of excluded regions of a slice of the complicated parameter space of SUSY theories.

Otherwise, if you want to know a bit more of what this is about, I can provide some detail.

Yes, I have that twisted nerve too - I sneeze when I shouldn't

Aug 26 2012 | comment(s)

Okay, I am coming out for the interest of Science.

I read today this article, which does not really say anything new to me, but for some reason triggered my wish to speak up about the condition. The article explains clearly that some people have a twisted connection in their nerves, sort of a short-circuit, which makes them sneeze when they think about sex (others have the same kind of problem making them sneeze when they are looking at bright light sources, e.g. the sun).