As yesterday in Italy was the equivalent of Labor Day, and today is a Saturday, with people around me exploiting the three-day rest for a recreational trip, I do not feel in a very productive mood, so rather than writing something original here I will exploit other people's work, pointing at what I found interesting or anyway worth my attention among the papers appeared on the Cornell Arxiv in the last few days, and other assorted material.
"La belle Hélène" is a beautiful operetta by Jacques Offenbach. Now for the first time it has been translated and performed in Greek in Athens, by a group of very talented singers under the artistic direction of Panagiotis Adam. I saw "Η Ωράια Ελένη" yesterday at the Olvio theatre in Athens, and I enjoyed it a whole lot.
The story unfolds as Eleni, the wife of Sparta's king Menelaos, lives in a world where men only concern with warfare and neglect love. As Paris, the prince of Troy, arrives disguised as a sheperd, and catches her attention. Eleni's flirt with Paris is discovered by Menelaos, but the two manage to escape together.
I am presently in Athens for a few days, to give a seminar and meet the local group of CMS physicists. So I took the chance to visit yesterday evening the Astrophysics department of the University of Athens, where at the top floor is housed a nice 40cm Cassegrain telescope (see picture below). There I joined a small crowd which professor Kosmas Gazeas entertained with views of Jupiter, the Moon, Venus, and a few other celestial targets. I need to thank my friend Nadia, a fellow physicist and amateur astronomer, for inviting us to the event.
I received from Ravi Kuchimanchi, the author of a paper to be published in Phys. Rev. D, the following summary, and am happy to share it here. The paper is
available in the arxiv.
Are laws of nature left-right symmetric?
Besides being a giant triumph of theoretical physics and the definitive seal on the correctness of the Standard Model -at least at the energies at which we are capable of investigating particle physics nowadays-, the 2012 discovery of the Higgs boson by the CMS and ATLAS collaborations opens the way to new searches of new physics.
The Higgs boson is one more particle we know how to identify now, so we can now focus on new exotic phenomena that might produce Higgs bosons in the final state, and entertain ourselves in their search.
Holiday Chess Riddle
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The Buried Lottery
Twenty Years Blogging
