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The Problem With Peer Review

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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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Nanopoulos: Aroma Of Gluinos In LHC Data

Nanopoulos: Aroma Of Gluinos In LHC Data

Mar 12 2012 | comment(s)

It is a gloomy winter for most SUSY phenomenologists: as they sit and watch, the LHC experiments continue to publish their search results for Supersymmetric particles, producing tighter and tighter direct bounds on the masses of squarks and gluinos for a variety of possible choices of the many free parameters defining the models under test. It looks as if the general feeling is "Today it's your preferred model going down the drain, tomorrow it might be my own".
Tevatron Higgs Results Confirm LHC Signal!

Tevatron Higgs Results Confirm LHC Signal!

Mar 07 2012 | comment(s)

2.2 standard deviations. That is what the combination of CDF and DZERO searches for the Higgs boson yield, according to a release of the interactions news wire.

The talks on Higgs searches are scheduled for this morning at the Moriond Electroweak conference in La Thuile, a nice ski resort in the Italian alps.

The money plot is the one below, which shows the upper limit on the Higgs boson production rate, in units of the Standard Model expectation (y=1 on the vertical axis corresponds to the SM Higgs production rate, for the particular mass identified by the abscissa in the graph).


Bs To μμ: LHCb Getting There!

Bs To μμ: LHCb Getting There!

Mar 06 2012 | comment(s)

The Moriond EWK conference is in full swing and results are being shown of the recent new searches for rare decays of the Bs meson. The Bs is a hadron made up by a bottom quark and a (anti)strange one. The peculiar composition of this particle and its zero electric charge make it a very interesting probe of new physics in its decays: new physics processes might give a sizable contribution to the rate of decays yielding pairs of muons, which are both very rare in the standard model, and very easy to identify in the detector.
DZERO: 23 MeV Uncertainty On W Boson Mass

DZERO: 23 MeV Uncertainty On W Boson Mass

Mar 02 2012 | comment(s)

Just a few days ago the CDF collaboration announced their new measurement of the W boson mass, with a considerable improvement over the precision of the current world average for that quantity. Now DZERO, the competitor experiment, has also published their own new measurement, which is based on a statistics of 4.3 inverse femtobarns - twice as many data as the ones used by CDF.
Guest Post: Carl Brannen On CP Violation

Guest Post: Carl Brannen On CP Violation

Feb 29 2012 | comment(s)

As today I have just published a piece on CP violation which lacks detail on the theoretical aspects of the issue, I think it is a good time to offer you here a post on the matter written by Carl Brannen, a independent researcher and now Ph.D. student who is a great example of how what is typically dubbed "crackpottery" can at times convert into accepted science. Carl has managed to get a few of his papers accepted for publication, but he remains "on the edge", dealing with issues that many frown upon. Maybe he is right, or maybe he is not, but I sympathize with his approach, so I occasionally offer him this site for his pieces [TD].
LHCb Measures Direct CP Violation In Bs Mesons

LHCb Measures Direct CP Violation In Bs Mesons

Feb 29 2012 | comment(s)

A long awaited confirmation that direct CP violation occurs in Bs mesons (particles composed of a b- and an s-quark) not unlike what happens to lighter mesons (the K0, the B0, and the D0) is coming from LHCb. In an article appeared yesterday in the Cornell arxiv, LHCb describe their measurement of direct CP violation in the decays of both B0 and Bs mesons to Kπ final states (a kaon and a pion). The former is now the best precision measurement we have of the phenomenon, the latter is also the most precise bid (only one former measurement of the effect exists).