A Quantum Diaries Survivor

If you have a minute to spend watching something really cool, why not having a look at the completion of the installment of GEM detectors in the CMS experiment at the CERN Large Hadron Collider, ***RIGHT NOW*** (6PM CEST Oct 24th) ?

The most recent preprint in the ArXiv this evening is an APPEC report on the neutrinoless double beta decay. This is the thick result of a survey of the state of the art in the search for a very (very) rare subnuclear process, which can shed light on the nature of the mass hierarchy of neutrinos. Oh, and, APPEC stands for "AstroParticle Physics European Consortium", in case you wondered.

This week's Plot relates to the search of rare decays of the Higgs boson, through the analysis of the large amounts of proton-proton collision data produced by the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), CERN's marvelous 27km particle accelerator. The ATLAS collaboration, which is one of the four main scientific equipes looking at LHC collisions, produced an improved bound on the rate at which Higgs bosons may decay to electron-positron pairs (which they are expected to do, although very rarely, in the Standard Model, SM) and to electron-muon pairs (which are forbidden in the SM).

A few weeks ago, in an article where I discussed some new ideas for fundamental physics research, I briefly touched on an incident in which Paul Frampton, a well-known theoretical physicist, got involved in 2011. The paragraph in question read:

Sometimes browsing the Cornell ArXiv results in very interesting reading. It is the case with the preprint I got to read today, "DAMA/LIBRA annual modulation and Axion Quark Nugget Dark Matter Model", by Ariel Zhitnitsky. This article puts forth a bold speculative claim, which I found exciting for a variety of reasons. As is the case with bold speculative claims, the odds that they turn out to describe reality is maybe small, but their entertainment value is large. So what is this about?

On August 20, in occasion of the "5th International Workshop on Nucleon Structure at Large Bjorken x", organized at the Orthodox Academy of Crete, I had the pleasure to accompany at the piano my wife, the soprano Kalliopi Petrou, for a concert offered to the participants to the workshop by the organizers.

Today I am back from the 8th edition of the ICNFP conference, which finished yesterday in Kolymbari (Crete). This event is very interesting because of its wide scope, bringing together physicists from quite different fields in a venue that, due to its very relaxing, secluded nature favours post-session discussions and exchanges among the over 250 participants. 

I am presently spending a few days in the pleasant island of Crete, in the middle of the Mediterranean, where I am attending the eight edition of the "International Conference on New Frontiers in Physics". Crete is a gorgeous island at the crossroads of three continents, and because of its location it is brimming with relics of ancient to less ancient history. Anyway, this post is rather about physics, so let me go back there. 

Ever since telescopes were first invented, by some dutch lens grinder in the late XVIth century, and then demonstrated to be invaluable tools for investigating the cosmos around us by Galileo Galilei in the early 1600s, there has been a considerable, steady effort to construct bigger and better ones. Particularly bigger ones.

I'll admit, I wanted to rather title this post "Billionaire Awards Prizes To Failed Theories", just for the sake of being flippant. But in any joke there is a little bit of truth, as I wish to discuss below.The (not-so-anymore) news is that the "Special Breakthrough prize" in fundamental physics, instituted a decade ago by Russian philantropist Yuri Milner, and then co-funded by other filthy wealthy folks, recently went to three brillant theoretical physicists: Sergio Ferrara, Dan Freedman,  and Peter van Nieuwenzhuizen, who in the seventies developed an elegant quantum field theory, SuperGravity. 

Our current understanding of the Universe includes the rather unsettling notion that most of its matter is not luminous - it does not clump into stars, that is. Nobody has a clue of what this Dark Matter (DM) really is, and hypotheses on what it could be made of are sold at a dime a dozen. On the other hand, we clearly see the gravitational effects of DM on galaxies and clusters of galaxies, so the consensus of the scientific community is that one of those cheap theories must be true. What make this very close to a dream situation for an experimental scientist is the fact that we do have instruments capable of detecting, or ruling out, dark matter behaving according to most of the majority of those possibilities. 

While you and I may have been lagging behind a bit as of late, excused by a particularly hot July, the CMS collaboration has kept grinding its data, producing exquisite new results from the large amounts of proton-proton collisions that the experiment has been collecting during Run 2, i.e. until last year. Of course, the process of going from subatomic collisions to submitted papers is a long and complex one. The first part of the journey involves triggering, storage, and reconstruction of the acquired datasets, and reduction of the data into an analysis-friendly format. While this might sound like a partly automatic and painless procedure, it involves the expense of liters of sweat by conscentious collaborators who oversee the data acquisition and their processing.