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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

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 »

ICFP 2012 Day One

Jun 11 2012 | comment(s)

The island of Crete, in the middle of the Mediterranean sea, is home to ICFP 2012, a conference in high-energy physics. I arrived yesterday night and this morning I woke up with a gorgeous view of the sun rising over a blue sea.

(The picture shows a beach not far from here, which I'll visit on Wednesday. It is called "Balos beach" and it is a wonderful place).

New CERN Results On Rare B Decays: A Tombstone To SUSY ?

Jun 08 2012 | comment(s)

The CERN average of searches for rare B decays to muon pairs has been shown yesterday in a talk given by Mitesh Patel at the "Physics at the LHC" conference, which is being held in Vancouver (BC) this week. And the results are not very encouraging for supporters of Supersymmetry: the data is compatible with a Standard Model signal, but there is almost no space left for additional contributions due to the exchange of virtual SUSY particles in the loops producing the decays.

NASA Does It Better

Jun 06 2012 | comment(s)

The winner picture of the Venus transit must be the one below, whose original version can be found here. Thanks Bente Lilya Bye for posting the link on her Facebook page!

The picture was taken by Hinode, a joint JAXA-NASA mission to study the Sun's magnetism in and around sunspots.

In case you ain't seen it yet

Jun 06 2012 | comment(s)

Well, so as predicted Venus passed over the disk of our Sun yesterday (this morning, if you live in Europe), and it produced quite a show, as many pictures and videos available around testify. To make the view more pleasing, our Sun was showing a discrete amount of solar spots, betraying the fact that we are approaching Solar Max (there is a 11-year cycle of solar activity, which manifests itself visually with black spots appearing on the disk, and on the Earth with auroras and electromagnetic disturbances).

In case you want a quick link to a nice slideshow showing Venus crossing the Sun's disk in a set of some thirty images, please visit this flicker site.

Enough Luminosity For A Higgs Discovery!

Jun 05 2012 | comment(s)

The LHC collider has been producing proton-proton collisions at a centre-of-mass energy of 8 TeV for two months now, and the integrated luminosity collected by the CMS experiment has surpassed the mark of 4 inverse femtobarns (see figure below). That's already about 80% of the total bounty of 2011!

Venus Approaching The Sun

Jun 04 2012 | comment(s)

For the second and last time this century, the planet Venus will pass over the visible disk of our Sun for observers located in the Americas (in the evening of June 5th) and western Europe (in the morning of June 6th). The event has a noteworthy scientific value -particularly for exoplanetary searches-, but it is also quite spectacular to observe, if you have some modest equipment (but you should be able to spot it with your naked eye, provided you only look through a thick-smoked glass; never look at the Sun directly!). The added value is that probably none of us will be around the next time this event occurs, in 2117.