Fake Banner
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...

Summer Lectures In AI

Winter is not over yet, but I am already busy fixing the details of some conferences, schools,...

User picture.
picture for Hank Campbellpicture for Heidi Hendersonpicture for Bente Lilja Byepicture for Sascha Vongehrpicture for Patrick Lockerbypicture for Johannes Koelman
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 »

 Blogroll
Watch The Perseids Tonight!

Watch The Perseids Tonight!

Aug 11 2010 | comment(s)

This is a good year for summer meteor watching. The moon, just past new, will not interfere with observations of faint meteors. And the Perseid shower, originated from the dust left behind in the orbit of comet Swift-Tuttle, will produce a nice show. 

Perseids are a rather stable stream, and they produce a detectable rate of meteors from late July to late August, with peaks in the nights of August 11th and 12th, depending on the exact trajectory that the Earth takes while plunging in the dust-ridden area of the solar system. The rate is usually encoded in the acronym "ZHR", for zenith-hourly-rate. ZHR values of 100 to 150 are common for the two highest-rate nights.


But what exactly should you expect to see ?
Top Quark Asymmetry - Something Else To Watch

Top Quark Asymmetry - Something Else To Watch

Aug 10 2010 | comment(s)

CDF and DZERO, the two experiments at the Fermillab Tevatron collider, have studied top quark production since their own discovery of the heavy particle in 1995 (see here, here, and here for a three-post history of the top quark quest).
In Athens

In Athens

Aug 06 2010 | comment(s)

No, this is not about Physics. No, you are probably not interested. No, this blog is not only about science. I sometimes use it as -guess what- a log book, a diary. A habit I have learned five years ago, as I walked my first steps in the world of blogging, here. They (the organizers of "Quantum Diaries") wanted me to write about my life, and they got it. I learned a job, and some weird habits, like talking about my private life in public. It never caused much trouble, not nearly as much as just writing good articles on particle physics!
My Bet? A Fourth Generation Quark

My Bet? A Fourth Generation Quark

Aug 04 2010 | comment(s)

What picture should we draw of the quest for new phenomena after the presentation of a wealth of new results at the international conference on high-energy physics in Paris held last week ? I am speaking in particular of results coming from the experiments at the Tevatron and LHC, which are all studying hadron collisions in search for still unseen effects to both confirm (with the discovery of the Higgs boson) or break down (with the observation of Supersymmetry, new particles, extra dimensions, or still other effects) the present theoretical understanding of fundamental physics which the standard model provides us with.
The Say Of The Week

The Say Of The Week

Aug 02 2010 | comment(s)

"I don't want to achieve immortality through my work... I want to achieve it through not dying"

Woody Allen
Global Electroweak Fits, Summer 2010

Global Electroweak Fits, Summer 2010

Aug 01 2010 | comment(s)

After the issuing of new top mass results by the Tevatron experiments, it is time for another look at global electroweak fits of standard model observables. The Gfitter group has produced new fits for the standard model in search of the most probable value of the Higgs boson mass, given the new measurements of top quark mass and other quantities, and the huge amount of existing information on sensitive observables from the standard model.

Unfortunately, I could find no update including the new Higgs search results yet. I guess such a fit will be ready in a few weeks... But the new released information is already interesting enough that we may meaningfully spend a few words around some figures here.