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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...

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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 Say Of The Week - Heinrich on Coverage

The Say Of The Week - Heinrich on Coverage

Dec 28 2011 | comment(s)

"Exact coverage, like the Grail of legend, if approached by any but a perfectly
pure and holy frequentist, is borne away and vanishes from sight."

Joel Heinrich, CDF internal Note 6438
ATLAS Discovers New Chi_b Resonance

ATLAS Discovers New Chi_b Resonance

Dec 24 2011 | comment(s)

Just as you thought it was over for 2011, and you proceeded to hung the Higgs mass plots on the christmas tree as a wish for stronger signals next year, ATLAS comes out with a new particle discovery. That's what I like of particle physics - there's always so much going on that the excitement is never really over.
High Resolution Images Of Vesta By DAWN

High Resolution Images Of Vesta By DAWN

Dec 23 2011 | comment(s)

NASA is featuring the first high-resolution images of asteroid Vesta as taken by the DAWN spacecraft during a low-altitude orbit. The images show a very interesting surface, battered with old and more recent craters, plus "textures such as small grooves and lineaments that are reminiscent of the structures seen in low-resolution data from the higher-altitude orbits. Also, this fine scale highlights small outcrops of bright and dark material." (from the NASA piece).
Franco Rimondi, 1944-2011

Franco Rimondi, 1944-2011

Dec 23 2011 | comment(s)

I was saddened today upon hearing of the death of Franco Rimondi, a colleague in the CDF experiment. Franco was a professor of physics at the university of Bologna since 1980. His research in particle physics encompasses the last forty years, during which he collaborated with many experiments, starting with bubble chamber kaon decay studies in the late sixties, and then ADONE at Frascati in the seventies, and the split field magnet (SFM) at CERN. The experiment he spent most of his research career on was however probably CDF, at the Fermilab Tevatron collider.
Those Deceiving Error Bars

Those Deceiving Error Bars

Dec 22 2011 | comment(s)

Have you ever looked at a histogram with the data displayed as counts per bin in the form of points with error bars, and wondered whether those fluctuations and departures from the underlying hypothesized model (usually overimposed as a continuous line or histogram) were really significant or worth ignoring ?
The Say Of The Week - D'Agostini: Practically Everybody

The Say Of The Week - D'Agostini: Practically Everybody

Dec 19 2011 | comment(s)

"[...] practically nobody took very seriously the CDF claim (not even most
members of the collaboration, and I know several of them), while practically everybody is
now convinced that the Higgs boson has been finally caught at CERN – no matter if
the so called ‘statistical significance’ is more ore less the same in both cases"

G. D'Agostini, "Probably a discovery", arxiv:1112.3620