A Quantum Diaries Survivor

I apologize to you, dear reader, for not having written yet about the 2.5 standard deviation excess that the ATLAS collaboration has recently found in diboson final states at 2 TeV in the 2012 8-TeV data. I thought it was interesting, but for some reason the distributions published by the experiment did not stimulate my fantasy enough to trigger an article here. Or maybe, it was because they got published at a time when I had too much on my plate to deal with it...

Among the many things that CMS and ATLAS physicists are looking forward to checking up, using the data that the LHC is starting to deliver from 13 TeV proton-proton collisions, one is the WH resonance signal that CMS found in a recent analysis. Mind you, "signal" here is a misnomer: what was seen was most probably a insignificant fluctuation of the background; yet we must keep our mind open to interpretation changes.The search I am talking about is one CMS did for boosted Higgs bosons recoiling against boosted W bosons, in a "back-to-back" topology (paper is here).

The light we receive from the sun is composed of all visible frequencies, among others, and it therefore appears white to our natural detection system - the human eye. Apparently, evolution caused us to develop a vision which works best at the center of the frequency spectrum emitted by the Sun. That notwithstanding, I am sure that if you ask the question "what colour is the Sun" to the average Joe, you will get an equal share of "white" and "yellow", and maybe some "red" answers. Besides, who among us has never painted a red Sun in a blue sky as a child ? 

The second infn school of statistics took place this week in the nice "green island" of Ischia, in the gulf of Naples, Italy. Organized by the INFN section of Naples, the school aims at training Ph.D. students and post-graduates in the foundations and the applications of the statistical methods most used nowadays in particle physics, nuclear physics, and astrophysics.

Yesterday I posed a question - Are the first collisions recorded by the LHC running at 13 TeV the highest-energy ever produced by mankind with subatomic particles ? It was a tricky one, as usual, meant to think about the matter.I received several tentative answer in the comments thread, and thus answered there. I paste the text here as it is of some interest to some of you and I wish it does not go overlooked.---Dear all, 

The LHC has finally started to produce 13-TeV proton-proton collisions! The picture below shows one such collision, as recorded by the CMS experiment today. The blue boxes show the energy recorded in the calorimeter, which measures particle energy by "destroying" them as they interact with the dense layers of matter that this device is made up of; the yellow curves show tracks reconstructed by the ionization deposits of charged particles left in the silicon detector layers of the inner tracker. 

The European Union has released some data on the latest call for applications for ITN grants. These are "training networks" where academic and non-academic institutions pool up to provide innovative training to doctoral students, in the meanting producing excellent research outputs.

I spent the last weekend in Berlin, attending a conference for editors organized by Elsevier. And I learnt quite a bit during two very busy days. As a newbie - I am handling editor for the journal "Reviews in Physics" since January this year - I did expect to learn a lot from the event; but I will admit that I decided to accept the invitation to attend the event more out of curiosity for a world that is at least in part new to me, rather than out of professional sense of duty.

I am very happy today because I have been notified by the European Community that a project I submitted for funding as coordinator last January has been evaluated very positively by the EU reviewers. The project is a training network of universities and research centres in Europe, with participation of two additional academic partners and four industrial partners from the US, Russia, Italy and Belgium. The network name is "AMVA4NewPhysics", and it aims at developing and applying cutting-edge statistical learning tools to new physics and Englert-Higgs boson studies to the LHC data collected by ATLAS and CMS.

A 

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.

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.