Impressive. If you had been seeking for top quarks in 4-inverse-picobarns datasets since 1992 as I have, and then rejoiced at the 7-event signal from which CDF extracted in 1994 mass and cross section of the long-sought sixth quark, you would now also be looking for adjectives upon having a look at the figures in the new CMS paper, which uses over one inverse femtobarn of proton-proton collisions to measure the tiny asymmetric kinematics of top quark pairs produced at the LHC.

This afternoon (2.30 PM Chicago time) Pat Lukens, an old-timer of the CDF experiment, will give a "wine and cheese" seminar at Fermilab on the new observation of a heavy baryon, of the family of baryons containing bottom quarks, which was still at large.

The new particle, called "Xi_b^0", fits a hole in the group representation graph of ground-state baryons with J=1/2. You can see it in the graph on the right. Of all states in the middle level (ones containing one bottom quark) only the Xi_b^0 was still missing. By the way: none of the baryons of the top level have yet been observed.

Blogging from the whereabouts of one of the most beautiful places of the Mediterranean, Balos Beach (see picture), I wish to draw your attention today to one fun search that CMS produced on data collected in 2010: the one for gluinos in events with six jets.

I was waiting for the announcement in the Fermilab seminar of next Friday, but apparently despite I am still a member I am not well enough informed of what happens inside CDF, the experiment at the Tevatron proton-antiproton collider of Fermilab. So the paper is now public, and you can read the news in the Cornell arxiv: CDF sees an excess of muon pairs which is compatible with originating from the decay of B_s mesons.