A Quantum Diaries Survivor

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.

I thought it would be good to let you readers of this column know that in case you wish to order the book "Anomaly! Collider Physics and the Quest for New Phenomena at Fermilab" (or any other title published by World Scientific, for that matter) you have 10 more days to benefit of a 35% discount off the cover price. Just visit the World Scientific site of the book and use the discount code WS16XMAS35).

I am spending a week in Israel to visit three physics institutes for colloquia and seminars: the Tel Aviv University (where I gave a colloquium yesterday), the Haifa Technion (where I am giving a seminar today), and the Weizmann institute in Rehovot (where I'll speak next Wednesday).

Today I am actually quite proud of my research institute, the "Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare, INFN, which leads Italian research in fundamental physics. In fact a selection to hire 73 new researchers with permanent positions has reached its successful conclusion. Rather than giving you my personal opinions (very positive!) I think it is better to let speak the INFN president Fernando Ferroni, and the numbers themselves.

During the past few months I have been giving seminars and colloquia in several institutes around Europe and the US. The topic was more or less always the same, i.e. the discovery criterion used in fundamental physics to decide whether to claim for the observation of a new phenomenon. We set this at 5-sigma -that's, e.g., how the Higgs boson has been discovered in 2012. This is an arbitrary choice, and there is a lot to learn from a study of the history of how the criterion became an established practice, and from the statistical issues it entails.Here is a list of the past events:- Oslo University, October 26- LIP Lisbon, October 27- SLAC laboratory, November 8- Northwestern University, November 11- Royal Holloway University London, November 30

Today while I was having a shower I happened to think at how cool it is that we can actually measure the rate of production, in single hadron-hadron collisions, of multiple elementary particles. A graph like the one below, now routinely produced by ATLAS and CMS whenever they collect more data or switch to a higher center-of-mass energy, looks "natural" to produce, but it is actually surprising that we indeed can pull it off - it requred careful design choices in a number of ways. I wish to discuss one of these here.

In any physicists' new-year wish list there is a mandatory item: the finding of some unexpected, bolt-from-the-blue new physics result - possibly leading to highly-cited publications, press interviews and invitations, and ultimately career advancements or other similar ego boosts. Because we do it for the progress of mankind and the furthering of human knowledge, but we also do it for ourselves- we are human beings too.

As I am traveling around Europe this week, giving seminars in several places (Hamburg yesterday, Berlin today, and Clermont-Ferrand on Friday) my connectivity is erratic and my capability to follow the development of data analysis and new publications is strongly lowered. My connections to the world of LHC research continues through email exchanges, though.

The DZERO collaboration published earlier this year a search for resonances decaying to pairs in its Run-2 dataset of 2-TeV proton-antiproton collisions, produced by the now defunct Tevatron collider in the first 10 years of this century.

I am told that when a patient is diagnosed with a terminal illness, he or she will likely go through a well-defined sequence of stages. The first stage is Denial: the patient will convince him- or herself that there is a mistake in the diagnosis, that somehow the doctors are wrong, or something alike. It is a protective, visceral reaction, one preventing the shock of reckoning with a completely altered landscape. There follows a state of Anger: the "why me" sentiment is the cause of this state of mind. Then there is Fear, brought about by the lack of knowledge of what is coming. Then comes Grief - for oneself as well as for the loved ones. And finally, Acceptance, which brings peace to the soul.

The book "Anomaly! Collider physics and the quest for new phenomena at Fermilab" is about to be published, after a somewhat long and anti-climatic wait. And the first presentation events are being scheduled here and there.If you are at CERN I hope I will see you at the CERN library (bldg 52) on November 29th, at 4PM. The book should already be available for retail by then. On that occasion I will just chat a little about the contents, answer questions, and maybe read one or two paragraphs to those of you who will come by.The event is detailed in this indico page.