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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 »

LHC @ 8 TeV: First Week Of 2012 Run

Apr 10 2012 | comment(s)

Last week the Large Hadron Collider has started producing collisions at the record high 8-TeV centre-of-mass energy to the ATLAS and CMS detectors.

In the course of the first week of run almost 200 inverse picobarns have been delivered to CMS, which is absolutely satisfactory.

The integrated luminosity versus time is shown below.

And here is the peak instantaneous luminosity reached during these first few days of running:

(NB: I believe the above figure lacks a "s^-1" units).

A Stroll in the park with Bente

Apr 08 2012 | comment(s)

As I had announced in my blog, I spent four days in Oslo before Easter, visiting museums with my kids and my fiancee, and enjoying the place -new to all of us.

Off to Oslo

Apr 03 2012 | comment(s)

Today I am leaving to Norway, for a visit of few days. If you happen to have suggestions for things to see and do there, please drop me a line in the comments thread below; I will be traveling with my son Filippo (13 yo) and daughter Ilaria (9), so avoid advising me on night clubs or wine bars; museums and entertainment are more like what I am likely to be interested in.

Also, if you live nearby and are (presumably) interested in particle physics, I will be happy to have a drink together. I'll tell you the news from the LHC experiments, you can in return give me information about the place. My phone number is 0039-3468671707.

Unmistakable Gluino Signal In ATLAS !!

Apr 01 2012 | comment(s)

And after all I said about Supersymmetry being an invention, I fear I now have to eat it all with my hat to boot ! The ATLAS Collaboration has just released results of a very striking search for gluinos, which increases the sensitivity over past analyses by employing a much improved and cleaned-up version of missing transverse energy along with a higher-resolution version of the effective mass variable used in the past, and has found a first strong evidence for Supersymmetric decays !!

Superluminal Neutrinos: Opera Spokesperson Resigns

Mar 30 2012 | comment(s)

Antonio Ereditato (left), spokesperson of the Opera collaboration, announced today he stepped down. He is no longer leading the Opera experiment.

The Opera experiment last September made headlines around the world with their announcement that neutrinos sent from the CERN laboratories to the Gran Sasso cavern appeared to be moving at superluminal speed.

The Hubble Legacy Archive For You

Mar 29 2012 | comment(s)

The Hubble Legacy Archive is now open for you to browse ! Thousands of unscrutinized images of the sky as pictured by the Hubble Space Telescope are there for you to browse, reprocess, analyze. They even challenge you to find hidden treasures, and submit them for their scrutiny. It is a marvelous opportunity to get personal with all the beauties of our cosmos. There is an online tool for changing colours and contrast of each picture.

Have a look at what you can find with just seconds of searches: the picture below portraits one of my favourite targets in late summer nights, Stephan's quintet (here shown only four of the main components).