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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...

Interna

In the past few years my activities on this site - but I would say more in general, as the same...

The Probability Density Function: A Known Unknown

Perhaps the most important thing to get right from the start, in most statistical problems, is...

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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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One More Higgs Search: H To Four Leptons

One More Higgs Search: H To Four Leptons

Jul 23 2011 | comment(s)

In my short summary of analyses recently published by CMS, yesterday I left out one which had not yet been released. It is the search for the "golden channel" of Higgs decay, the one which motivated the construction of detectors with large acceptance to energetic leptons: the decay to two Z bosons, with a subsequent decay of the Z's to two charged leptons each.
Five New Higgs Searches By CMS!

Five New Higgs Searches By CMS!

Jul 22 2011 | comment(s)

An orgy of new results has started. Let me just show a few of them concerning Higgs searches in CMS - I am on vacation after all, and I have little time left to comment these interesting new papers and plots after all the sunbathing and restaurants.

Let us start with the Higgs search in the diphoton decay mode by CMS (paper here). With 1.09 inverse femtobarns of data, CMS has a pretty good reach even to this very rare decay mode of the Higgs boson. Let me remind you that only a handful every thousand Higgs particles decay into two photons, in the most favourable circumstances.
Top Quark Asymmetry? No Thanks, Says CMS

Top Quark Asymmetry? No Thanks, Says CMS

Jul 21 2011 | comment(s)

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.
A New Beautiful Baryon Bagged By CDF

A New Beautiful Baryon Bagged By CDF

Jul 20 2011 | comment(s)

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.
Guess The Plot 6

Guess The Plot 6

Jul 19 2011 | comment(s)

Today I casually ran into a very nice figure which is perfect for an entry as "guess the plot", both because of its mysterious appearance, and because of the interesting physics it hides. It is a two-dimensional "surface" and its shape should tell you something. For the moment, I will just say it is something which has to do with both particle physics and astrophysics, and that it is quite cool, being a new way of looking at something we know well.


CMS Sees No Gluinos - But Will Keep Looking

CMS Sees No Gluinos - But Will Keep Looking

Jul 18 2011 | comment(s)

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.