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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...

Tommaso Dorigo

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 »

CERN And LIP Openings For Graduate Students In Physics - Good $$$

Nov 30 2015 | comment(s)

Have you recently obtained a Masters degree in a scientific discipline ? Are you fascinated by particle physics ? Do you have an interest in Machine Learning developments, artificial intelligence, and all that ? Or are you just well versed in Statistical Analysis ? Do you want to be paid twice as much as I am for attending a PhD ? If the above applies to you, you are certainly advised to read on.

Single Top Production At The LHC

Nov 27 2015 | comment(s)

As an editor of the new Elsevier journal "Reviews in Physics" I am quite proud to see that the first submissions of review articles are reaching publication stage. Four such articles are going to be published in the course of the next couple of months, and more are due shortly thereafter.

Supersymmetry Is About To Be Discovered, Kane Says

Nov 23 2015 | comment(s)

While in the process of fact-checking information that is contained in the book I am finalizing, I had the pleasure to have a short discussion with Gordon Kane during the weekend. A Victor Weisskopf distinguished professor at the University of Michigan as well as a director emeritus of the Michigan Center for Theoretical Physics, Gordon is one of the fathers of Supersymmetry, and has devoted the last three decades to its study.

Anomaly! - A Different Particle Physics Book

Nov 20 2015 | comment(s)

I was very happy today to sign a contract with an international publisher that will publish a book I have written. The book, titled "Anomaly! - Scientific Discoveries and the Quest for the Unknown", focuses on the CDF experiment, a particle detector that operated at the Tevatron collider for 30 years.
The Tevatron was the highest-energy collider until the turn-on of the LHC. The CDF and DZERO experiments there discovered the sixth quark, the top, and produced a large number of world-class results in particle physics.

The Mysterious Z Boson Width Measurement - CDF 1989

Nov 16 2015 | comment(s)

As I am revising the book I am writing on the history of the CDF experiment, I have bits and pieces of text that I decided to remove, but which retain some interest for some reason. Below I offer a clip which discusses the measurement of the natural width of the Z boson produced by CDF with Run 0 data in 1989. The natural width of a particle is a measurement of how undetermined is its rest mass, due to the very fast decay. The Z boson is in fact the shortest lived particle we know, and its width is of 2.5 GeV.

A 2 Meter Piece Of Junk Falling From Space

Nov 11 2015 | comment(s)

In a bit less than two days an orbiting object known with the peculiar name of WT1190F - but I'd like to rename it as WTF 1190 for obvious reasons - is expected to fall on Earth. The object was discovered by the Catalina Sky Survey in 2013 and little is known about its origin. It has a low density and makes a very eccentric revolution around us every three weeks.
Below is a picture taken by the University of Hawaii 2.2 meter telescope in October. The object is observed as a bright spot that shows a relative motion with respect to fixed stars.