A Quantum Diaries Survivor

A few days ago I received from my esteemed colleague Massimo Passera, a theorist and an INFN director of research in the Padova section where I also work, a draft of a new article he produced with his colleagues Antonio Masiero and Paride Paradisi, which is relevant to my present interests. The paper discusses what new physics effects could be accessible by the precision measurement of elastic scattering of energetic muons off electrons, in a setup which is being considered at the CERN north area for the determination of the hadronic contribution to the effective electromagnetic coupling (the article has meanwhile being published in the arXiv).

The Tevatron collider, the giant marvel accelerator built at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in the eighties and operated there for over thirty years, until its demise in 2012, lost one of its fathers the other day, as Alvin Tollestrup passed away.

Tollestrup was maybe the key contributor to the project of putting together a 1-TeV particle accelerator, solving many issues for the construction of its superconducting magnets. But he also was for a long time the spokesperson of the CDF experiment, and the driving force behind the collective effort that led CDF to see a first evidence of the top quark in 1994, and then claim discovery for the long sought sixth quark in 1995.

The ATLAS Collaboration has released last week the results of a careful analysis of a large dataset of proton-proton collisions acquired during Run 2 of the Large Hadron Collider. This is a measurement of CP violation effects in the system of B hadrons.

Although LHC and ATLAS are things that readers of Science20 may be acquainted with, I realize that the previous 14-word sentence contains already a mention of at least four unknown entities to 99.99% of non specialists, so I suspect I have to open a parenthesis already now.

One of the most suprising results of the "Machine Learning for Jets" (but really, for particle physics in general) workshop I attended in New York City two weeks ago was the outcome of a challenge that the organizers had proposed to the participants: find a hidden signal of some new physics process in a dataset otherwise made up of some physics background, when no information on the new physics was given, nor on the model of the background.\p>

The third "Machine Learning for Jets" workshop is ongoing these days at the Kimmel centre of New York University, a nice venue overlooking Washington Square park in downtown Manhattan. I came to attend it and remain up-to-date with the most advanced new algorithms that are been used for research in collider physics, as I have done last year. The workshop is really well organized and all talks are quite interesting, so this is definitely a good time investment for me.

What hurts you is not what you don't know, but those mistaken assumptions which "everyone knows to be true".[The following text is courtesy Andras Kovacs - T.D.]

Last month the Museum of Natural History of Venice hosted, in the last room of the exhibit called "room of the cetaceans" (where a large skeleton of a whale hangs from the ceiling), an exhibit of artwork produced by high-school students from the Venice area. The event, which belongs to the "Art and Science across Italy" project, was the culminating point of a series of lectures on particle physics, on science in art, and related topics which involved the students and INFN personnel from the Padova section.

Is there a fifth force of Nature, beyond the four we know about ? This question has been around ever since it was understood that 1 - electric charges attract and repel, and influence one another, due to the action of the electromagnetic force;2 - hadronic matter is held together by the strong force;3 - quarks transmute into other quarks due to the action of the weak force (and leptons do that too);4 - bodies carrying mass feel attracted to one another, although very weakly, by the gravitational force.

Last November 12 the city of Venice was flooded by the second-highest tide in recorded history. The sea level, pushed by 60 mph SE winds and intense rainfalls, surged to +187 cm above average, a mere 7cm less than the disastrous event of November 4 1966, which put the city and its surroundings to their knees.

[I extorted the text below from my friend and colleague Andrea Giammanco, who has been one of the driving forces behind a new scientific result at the crossroads of nuclear and particle physics - TD]A new result by the CMS collaboration [CMS-PAS-HIN-19-001, cds.cern.ch/record/2699428] demonstrates for the first time that top quarks can be produced in nucleus-nucleus collisions.

This year marks the 150th anniversary of the Periodic Table of Elements, whose inventor is Dmitrii Mendeleev, a Russian physicist who is famous for that achievement but who actually gave enormous contributions to Physics in a number of different areas of experimental research. It is also well known, but actually a misconception, that Mendeleev "invented" the correct recipe for the Russian national drink, vodka. In fact, he studied the mixture of water and alcohol in detail, discovering several of its interesting properties, but vodka was appreciated before him, as it did after.

Every two years the Biennale, a contemporary art exhibition, opens in Venice from May to November. This is one of the most important events of its kind, and it attract millions of visitors to a garden that contains a few dozen different pavillions, each hosting artwork from a different country. Over fifty more such independent museums are scattered around the city center and are free entry - these are even more fun to visit than the main exposition at the "Giardini della Biennale", as they allow visitors to visit the spaces themselves, often old houses or palaces that are otherwise unaccessible.