I once was an active chessplayer, but work duties have long taken tournaments off my plate - I simply do not have the time to sit through long hours of chess battles. So I play blitz online on chess.com (my handle is "tommasodorigo", in case you wondered).
Elementary particles are mysterious and unfathomable, and it takes giant accelerators and incredibly complex devices to study them. In the last 100 years we have made great strides in the investigations of the properties of quarks, leptons, and vector bosons, but I would lie if I said we know half of what we would like to. In science, the opening of a door reveals others, closed by more complicated locks - and no clearer example of this is the investigation of subatomic matter.
Decision trees are one of the many players in the booming field of supervised machine learning. They can be used to classify elements into two or more classes, depending on their characteristics. Their interest in particle physics applications is large, as we always need to try and decide on a statistical basis what kind of physics process originated the particle collision we see in our detector.
Today I would like to mention that my book "Anomaly! Collider Physics and the Quest for New Phenomena at Fermilab" is now available for purchase as E-Book at its World Scientific site.
I would like to use this space to advertise a couple of blogs you might be interesting to know about. Many of you who erratically read this blog may probably have already bumped into those sites, but I figured that as the readership of a site varies continuously, there is always the need to do some periodic evangelization.
Every year, at about this time, the level of activity of physicists working in experimental collaborations at high-energy colliders and elsewhere increases dramatically. We are approaching the time of "winter conferences", so called in order to distinguish them from "summer conferences". During winter conferences, which take place between mid-February and the end of March in La Thuile, Lake Louise, and other fashionable places close to ski resorts, experimentalists gather to show off their latest results. The same ritual repeats during the summer in a few more varied locations around the world.
The so-called Lambda_b baryon is a well-studied particle nowadays, with several experiments having measured its main production properties and decay modes in the course of the past two decades. It is a particle made of quarks: three of them, like the proton and the neutron. Being electrically neutral, it is easily likened to the neutron, which has a quark composition "udd". In the space of quark configurations, the Lambda_b is in fact obtained by exchanging a down-type quark of the neutron with a bottom quark, getting the "udb" combination.
Lubos Motl published the other day in his crazily active blog a very nice new review of "Anomaly! Collider Physics and the Quest for New Phenomena at Fermilab". The review is authored by Tristan du Pree, a colleague of mine who has worked in CMS until very recently - now he moved to a new job and changed to ATLAS! (BTW thanks Lubos, and thanks Tristan!)I liked a lot Tristan's commentary of my work, and since he mentions with quite appreciative terms the slow-motion description of a peculiar collision I offer in my book, I figured I'd paste that below.
In a few days, students from five high schools in Venice will be lectured on particle physics, the Higgs boson, the giant detectors of today's colliders, and will be treated with pictures and graphs aimed at stimulating their artistic vein.
I am pleased to report that the book I wrote on the CDF experiment and on collider physics at the Tevatron, "Anomaly!", has been declared this week's "book of the week" by the Times Higher Education site. There, you will be able to read Tara Shears' very nice review of my book, along with some additional considerations and biographical notes on yours truly by Karen Shook.
I am spending a post-wedding vacation in the Dominican Republic these days, and very slowly the stress level in my veins and muscles is leveling down. As you might imagine, I am still reading my emails and checking things here and there, but I do that with a slightly more careless attitude. Many of the emails I skip or overlook will haunt me for the next few weeks, i am sure - but for now, I can't be bothered.
I am happy to report, with this rather unconventional blog posting, that I am getting married on January 12. My companion is Kalliopi Petrou, a lyrical singer. There will be no huge party involved in the event, as Kalliopi and I have lived together for some time already and the ceremony will be minimalistic. None the less, we do give importance to this common decision, so much so that I thought it would be a good thing to broadcast in public - here.
Two days ago, before returning from Israel, my fiancee Kalliopi and I had a very nice dinner in a kosher restaurant near Rehovot in the company of Eilam Gross, Zohar Komargodski, and Zohar's wife Olga. The name of Eilam should be familiar to regulars of this blog as he wrote a couple of guest posts here, in similar occasions (in the first case it was a few before the Higgs discovery was announced, when the signal was intriguing but not yet decisive; and in the second case it was about the 750 GeV resonance, which unfortunately did not concretize into a discovery). As for Zohar, he is a brilliant theorist working in applications of quantum field theory. He is young but already won several awards, among them the prestigious New Horizons in Physics prize.
