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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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As I am traveling around Europe this week, giving seminars in several places (Hamburg yesterday, Berlin today, and Clermont-Ferrand on Friday) my connectivity is erratic and my capability to follow the development of data analysis and new publications is strongly lowered. My connections to the world of LHC research continues through email exchanges, though.
The DZERO collaboration published earlier this year a search for resonances decaying to pairs in its Run-2 dataset of 2-TeV proton-antiproton collisions, produced by the now defunct Tevatron collider in the first 10 years of this century.
I am told that when a patient is diagnosed with a terminal illness, he or she will likely go through a well-defined sequence of stages. 
The first stage is Denial: the patient will convince him- or herself that there is a mistake in the diagnosis, that somehow the doctors are wrong, or something alike. It is a protective, visceral reaction, one preventing the shock of reckoning with a completely altered landscape. There follows a state of Anger: the "why me" sentiment is the cause of this state of mind. Then there is Fear, brought about by the lack of knowledge of what is coming. Then comes Grief - for oneself as well as for the loved ones. And finally, Acceptance, which brings peace to the soul.
The book "Anomaly! Collider physics and the quest for new phenomena at Fermilab" is about to be published, after a somewhat long and anti-climatic wait. And the first presentation events are being scheduled here and there.
If you are at CERN I hope I will see you at the CERN library (bldg 52) on November 29th, at 4PM. The book should already be available for retail by then. On that occasion I will just chat a little about the contents, answer questions, and maybe read one or two paragraphs to those of you who will come by.

The event is detailed in this indico page.
A new paper by the ATLAS collaboration at the CERN Large Hadron Collider produces results in good agreement with standard model predictions: the unitarity of the cross section of the vector-boson scattering process, one of the original reasons for invoking the Higgs mechanism, has been tested by directly searching for electroweak production of W boson pairs associated with two forward-going hadronic jets. The energy dependence of the rate of the considered process provides information on whether the unitarity-restoring action of the Higgs boson is total, as the standard model predicts, or only partial.
Back to my office in Padova, I am looking back at last week's travel around the US and the two talks I delivered at SLAC (the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center) and Northwestern University. 

The event at SLAC was an experimental seminar. Due to a clash with a "Higgs coupling" workshop that was taking place at the same time, it did not attract a very large audience. Still, it was quite nice to meet a few of the SLAC scientists there, and in particular to chat with Stan Brodsky, a well-known theorist whom I had met in Valparaiso earlier this year. I am also grateful to Brandon Eberly, my host at SLAC, who took care of welcoming me there and introducing the seminar.