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On A Roll

What? Another boring chess game?Buzz off, this is my blog, and if I feel like posting a chess game...

When The Attack Plays Itself

After a very intense day at work, I sought some relaxation in online blitz chess today. And the...

Toponium Found By CMS!

The highest-mass subnuclear particle ever observed used to the the top quark. Measured for the...

The Problem With Peer Review

In a world where misinformation, voluntary or accidental, reigns supreme; in a world where lies...

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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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Waiting For December 13th

Waiting For December 13th

Dec 07 2011 | comment(s)

It is by now public that Rolf Heuer, the Director General of CERN, in announcing for December 13th two back-to-back talks of the CMS and ATLAS experiments on their Higgs search results with 2011 data, warned that the results might not be conclusive yet. Besides, nobody really could expect them to be, since the sensitivity expected by both ATLAS and CMS in the still not excluded region of the Higgs mass, with 5/fb of data per experiment and 7 TeV running conditions, ranges from 2 to 4 standard deviations in the rosiest circumstances.
Alejandro Rivero: Fermion Mass Coincidences And Other Fun Ideas

Alejandro Rivero: Fermion Mass Coincidences And Other Fun Ideas

Dec 04 2011 | comment(s)

The text below was graciously written for this blog by Alejandro Rivero (below),  a friend who has contributed to this blog other times in the past. His theoretical ideas are off the mainstream, but in a way which makes them interesting to me. I hope some of you will appreciate reading about the whole thing in summary here - Alejandro has a few papers out which you may want to read if you are specifically interested in the matter.

Higgs Expectations

Higgs Expectations

Dec 02 2011 | comment(s)

Update: I am keeping out of this, but you may well be interested in reading what Gibbs, Woit, and Motl have to say about recent leaks on the ATLAS and CMS results. So I hope I won't be crucified for three general links now!

Update 2: And it is now public that a seminar at CERN will be given by ATLAS and CMS on December 13th. So the wait is almost over, officially...

I have not written in a while - a full week. This is uncharacteristic enough that I owe you some sort of explanation.
Padova Loses Milla

Padova Loses Milla

Nov 25 2011 | comment(s)

Sadly, this morning Milla Baldo Ceolin passed away.

Milla was a volcanic physicist, and a fantastic professor. I had the pleasure of following her course of "Fisica Superiore" in the late eighties, and I remember her brilliant lessons, insightful and mind-broadening.

Milla was born in 1924, and graduated in Physics in 1951. In 1963 she was the first woman to become a professor in the University of Padova. Her research encompasses fifty years of subnuclear physics, and is especially centered on weak interactions. But in Padova, especially in the last two or three decades, her name was especially associated with neutrinos, the phenomenal particles at whose study her research was mostly aimed.
Multi-Muons In CDF: The Mystery Continues

Multi-Muons In CDF: The Mystery Continues

Nov 24 2011 | comment(s)

Do you remember the multi-muon anomaly in CDF ? The matter was discussed with quite some detail in a series of posts in this blog (back then at wordpress). In a nutshell, CDF could not explain their sample of events containing two muons, when these particles had a very large impact parameter (the impact parameter is the minimum distance of a trajectory from the interaction point: a large value indicates that the particle was produced elsewhere).
The Puzzling Weighted Average

The Puzzling Weighted Average

Nov 21 2011 | comment(s)

For you today here is a test of whether you shoud trust your intuition when confronted with an apparently simple problem. Incidentally, this article is the answer to the "Guess The Plot" riddle I posted a few days ago here.

Suppose you are given two measurements of the same physical quantity. Make it something easy to visualize, such as the length of a stick. They tell you that when measured with method 1 the result was x1=10 cm, with a estimated uncertainty s1=0.1 cm, and when measured with method 2 the result was x2=11 cm, with estimated uncertainty s2=0.5cm. Here is a question for you today: What is your best guess of the length of the stick ?