Long-time readers of this blog know that one of the recurrent topics has always been the precision measurement of the top quark mass. The reason for this is at least three-fold.
One, I started my career in experimental HEP with searches and measurements of the top quark properties, and the mass was one of the parameters I spent quite some time working on.
Technically it also creates a diboson final state - two photons - but no, here I am not going to talk about the tentative new particle of which ATLAS and CMS continue to see hints in their data, at a mass of 750 GeV and with characteristics that increasingly resemble those of a heavy higgs boson. Oh, see - I am doing precisely that. It is admittedly hard not to speak of that thing nowadays, but I will insist, as I think it is too good to be true, and so it must be false.
UPDATE: Tiziano tells me that he has been misquoted by the Guardian - he was quoting himself a colleague when he mentioned the 20:1 bet. Sorry to say this bet is not on, at least until the person who offered the bet in the first place will manifest him- or herself....
I bet most of you, who are interested in Physics, know what I mean when I talk about "the 750 GeV particle". Last December, the ATLAS and CMS experiments released information about a tantalizing hint of a new particle with a mass in the 750 GeV ballpark. The resonance was seen in the decay to pairs of energetic photons. Since both experiments see more or less the same thing, this may be a fluctuation, but if it is, it is a really rare one.
I am very happy to report that Professor Giorgio Parisi won another prize. Parisi is an Italian theoretical physicist who is very well known for his decisive contribution to QCD, with the DGLAP equations (the P stands for his last name) that govern the dynamics of gluons. However his work did not stop there - after that result Parisi continued excellent research and it is not by chance that he collected prizes and acknowledgements along the way for the more recent contributions he has given to theoretical physics.
The 2
016 prize called after Lars Onsager is given to Giorgio by the APS
I think it is due time that I point out a few interesting articles that have appeared in the past couple of months in
the blog of the AMVA4NewPhysics network, a consortium of 16 among universities, research institutes, and industries that has the goal of studying Higgs physics and new Physics with the LHC, using advanced statistical learning methods.
The issue is not new. Scientific journals require articles to produce quantitative answers - of course, that's how you do science. And scientists usually rely on a formalism based on classical statistics to report those results: they report the probability of their data given some hypothesis.
P-values, that is.
Holiday Chess Riddle
Why Measure The Top Quark Production Cross Section?
The Buried Lottery
Twenty Years Blogging
