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The Problem With Peer Review

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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 Quote Of The Week - Electroweak Unification

The Quote Of The Week - Electroweak Unification

May 21 2010 | comment(s)

"Leptons interact only with photons, and with the intermediate bosons that presumably mediate weak interactions. What could be more natural than to unite these spin-one bosons into a multiplet of gauge fields ? Standing in the way of this synthesis are the obvious differences in the masses of the photon and the intermediate (boson), and in their couplings. We might hope to understand these differences by imagining that the symmetries relating the weak and electromagnetic interactions are exact symmetries of the Lagrangian but are broken by the vacuum".

Steven Weinberg
Paper Sent!!!!!!!!

Paper Sent!!!!!!!!

May 19 2010 | comment(s)

Finally, the Bose-Einstein Correlations article by CMS to which I have personally contributed during the last few months is now an arxiv entry, and has been sent to Physical Review Letters. This is a success for the CMS collaboration, since we are the first to measure this effect in the new LHC proton-proton collisions, at 0.9 and 2.36 TeV of center-of-mass energy.
The Plot Of The Week - News On CP Violation

The Plot Of The Week - News On CP Violation

May 18 2010 | comment(s)

If you follow the blogosphere as a source of information on cutting-edge high-energy-physics results, you certainly by now know that the DZERO collaboration has produced a new exciting result. They find a 3.2 standard deviation effect in a study of charge asymmetry of muon pairs, which can be due to a unexpected, large source of CP violation -one which constitutes a very good shot at explaining the origin of the matter-antimatter asymmetry of the Universe!
A Dispensable Discovery

A Dispensable Discovery

May 15 2010 | comment(s)

While around the world particle physicists are working frantically to produce important new results to be shown at ICHEP 2010 -the International Conference on High-Energy Physics, which is held every two years and is arguably the single most important meeting for this branch of science-, new discoveries get claimed in an asynchronous way. And some of them in a very asynchronous way, I should say, since they are based on 40-years-old data.
Scientists, Ye Pedantic Jerks

Scientists, Ye Pedantic Jerks

May 13 2010 | comment(s)

Academics pay a lot of attention to the quality of their writings. It is generally a point of pride to publish flawless documents, and this is felt in scientific disciplines just as much as in literary ones. If I told you how much time the members of a scientific experiment such as CDF at the Tevatron or CMS at CERN (the ones I work in) spend in the review of their articles before these are sent to the publishers, you would be startled.
The ever-growing workload

The ever-growing workload

May 12 2010 | comment(s)

This is going to be a short post where I confess my recent troubles with keeping everything going on at full speed in my life, while the workload constantly grows.

I believe it is a temporary problem -I have experienced the same situation in the past- but I feel swamped by a few things that have piled up. So today, rather than reading on a new physics result or a new article on the arxiv, you are going to find here a list of the things I am not attending in order to write this short post. In random order:

  1. I have a undergraduate thesis to correct.
  2. I also need to write a reference letter for him, by next Sunday.
  3. There is a 100 pages paper in internal review by CDF and I am a member of the review committee.