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Holiday Chess Riddle

During Christmas holidays I tend to indulge in online chess playing a bit too much, wasting several...

Why Measure The Top Quark Production Cross Section?

As part of my self-celebrations for XX years of blogging activities, I am reposting here (very)...

The Buried Lottery

As part of my self-celebrations for having survived 20 years of blogging (the anniversary was a...

Twenty Years Blogging

Twenty years ago today I got access for the first time to the interface that allowed me to publish...

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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 Say Of The Week

The Say Of The Week

Jan 25 2010 | comment(s)

"On the infrequent occasions when I have been called upon in a formal place to play the bongo drums, the introducer never seems to find it necessary to mention that I also do theoretical physics."

(Richard Feynman)
Three Papers On The Muon Anomaly

Three Papers On The Muon Anomaly

Jan 24 2010 | comment(s)

A weekly visit to the Cornell Arxiv is more than enough for a physicist like me, since my daily work is not affected too much by whatever happens to be published there. Oftentimes, when I browse the contents of hep-ph (the folder containing preprints on particle phenomenology) I do not end up actually reading any papers, and limit myself to "sniffing" what is going on, by looking at the titles and author names. But at times I venture to browse through the pages, with mixed results.
Plot Of The Week - Supersymmetric Higgs Bosons Of The Third Kind

Plot Of The Week - Supersymmetric Higgs Bosons Of The Third Kind

Jan 21 2010 | comment(s)

I have no energy today to put together a detailed discussion of a brand new, exciting search for supersymmetric Higgs boson performed in data collected by the CDF experiment at the Tevatron proton-antiproton collider. All I can do for you is to show the interesting result of the search, and give you some very general ideas of what this is and why it is interesting. Maybe tomorrow or Saturday I will be able to pay more justice to the analysis.
Particle Physics In 2020

Particle Physics In 2020

Jan 18 2010 | comment(s)

2010 has just started with the best auspices to bring us exciting new science, and there comes a pledge to forecast what will happen in 2020. Oh, well - rest is not what I became a scientist for.

Making non-trivial predictions today for how will basic research be in subnuclear physics ten years down the line is highly non-trivial. For exactly the opposite reason that it is equally hard in several other fields of research.
Triggering - The Subtle Art Of Being Picky

Triggering - The Subtle Art Of Being Picky

Jan 17 2010 | comment(s)

The success of today's particle physics experiments relies to a surprisingly large extent on a seldom told functionality of the giant apparata that detect the faint echoes of subatomic particles hitting or punching through their sensitive regions: the capability of triggering.
Feynman Explains Quarks With A Burp

Feynman Explains Quarks With A Burp

Jan 16 2010 | comment(s)

"One way of thinking about the confinement problem was suggested by e+ e- annihilation into hadrons. Initially, the virtual photon dissociates into a quark and an antiquark that move with almost the speed of light back-to-back. Feynman had argued that additional pairs would be produced in the region between them, along the line separating the initially produced . The new pairs and original would rearrange and become a bunch of outgoing mesons [...].