A Quantum Diaries Survivor

The number of conferences held every year around the world to present and discuss topics in frontier particle physics is surprisingly large: over a hundred per year. Just look at the following list of conferences scheduled in the last three weeks for a proof (and no, March is not very different from other months):2/3 Moriond EWK4/3 KEKPH 20134/3 DPG 20139/3 Moriond QCD10/3 Aspen 201310/3 HiJetsUSC 201313/3 LHCC17/3 LISHEP 201318/3 MITP 201321/3 HFMCW 201321/3 DPHEP7 2013

The Planck collaboration has released today data from the first 16 months of operation of their space instrument (see left). There will be a live streaming of their announcements to the public in 1.5 hours at this link.

Here I vow to never "reblog", but exceptionally I will break that rule, translating from Italian a very nice article recently appeared on the Italian newspaper "Il Sole-24 Ore". The author is the INFN President, Fernando Ferroni. The reason why I break the rule is that the piece is quite clear and many of you may enjoy it. [The article transcript was taken from here]

The presentations of the last few days at the Neutrino Telescopes conference in Venice allowed me to get to full speed with the developments, new ideas, and new experiments taking data or just in design phase in this fascinating, relatively young field of investigation at the crossroads of particle physics and astrophysics. The talk slides are online in the conference site, but as usual by just flipping them one usually does not manage to get the most important points. So I am providing summaries of every talk, at the conference blog site.Yesterday I posted several articles there. Here is a list with links:- Status of Gerda

Here is a list of the reports of talks given yesterday at the Neutrino Telescope conference in Venice. You should give these a look if you are interested in sterile neutrinos, in the mass hierarchy of neutrinos, or in the phenomenology of neutrinos in general. THe reports are a bit technical and there are at present no figures to complement the text, but figures will be added soon.- Joachim Kopp: Status of Sterile Neutrino Scenarios- Michael Cribier: Reactor Antineutrino Anomalies in Europe

For the series "ideas worth spreading", CMS has copied the nice idea of ATLAS of producing an animated gif with increasing data leading to the Higgs boson discovery.This is the mass distribution of Higgs boson candidates, detected by collecting events featuring four charged leptons (electrons or muons). The leptons are combined in pairs, and one pair (of same flavour) will usually yield a mass in the ballpark of the Z boson mass; the other pair will have lower energy if it is produced by an off-shell Z boson. Of course all four-lepton pairs compatible with quality criteria are kept, and the mass distribution thus contains a majority of events due to standard model production of ZZ pairs. This is the peaking background at masses above 180 GeV.

Carlo Rubbia discussed the prospects of constructing a muon collider to produce large amounts of Higgs bosons and study their properties in detail, crucially measuring the natural width of the particle, and testing couplings to a precision that LHC can't arrive at, to verify whether the particle is the Standard Model Higgs or if there are anomalies. The talk is discussed in detail in this report.Here I just recall a question I asked Rubbia after the talk:

Now that the first of the Moriond conferences is over, and just as the second one starts, it is time to have a detached view at the Higgs boson results presented there this far by the CMS and ATLAS collaborations, to summarize where we stand and what new information we have gained since last fall, when some new results appeared for the HCP conference.

Nel 1929 Bruno Rossi, ricercatore presso l’istituto di fisica sperimentaledell’Università di Firenze [...] intuì quella che sarebbe stata la sua ragione di vita: indagare sulla natura di questi corpuscoli ionizzanti provenienti dall’alto. Doveva realizzare un circuito che permettesse di rivelare e contare le coincidenze che si verificavano in una certa unità di tempo e realizzò uno strumento molto semplice, il circuito a coincidenze.L’involucro dei tubi Geiger è collegato al polo negativo di una batteria da 1200 volt (nondisegnata). La scarica nei tubi genera un impulso di tensione negativa sulle resistenze da

Understanding and explaining how the Universe works has always been a ultimate goal for mankind. It is impossible to live our conscious existence without asking ourselves whether there is a meaning, a design, or if our existence is just the result of chance; and to avoid asking ourselves what happens after we die, if we will live again, and similar questions. Accepting our mortality is really hard without embracing a potential explanation, a hope, or some kind of faith.

Last week a new important paper appeared in the Arxiv: "MSSM Higgs Boson Searches at the LHC:Benchmark Scenarios after the Discovery of a Higgs-like Particle", by M.Carena, S.Heinemeyer, O. Stal, C.Wagner, and G.Weiglein. The paper fills a void that was created after the discovery of the Higgs particle last July by the ATLAS and CMS experiments: a thorough assessment of what constraints on the allowed chunks of SUSY parameter space in the light of the existence of a neutral scalar at 125 GeV.

CMS is one of the two huge detectors built to study the high-energy collisions of protons produced by the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. As all previous collider detectors, CMS is a redundant multi-purpose collection of dozens sub-detector components, which use different physics mechanisms to detect everything that comes out of the collision point, from protons to muons to photons, neutrinos (using the energy imbalance in the calorimeters), neutral hadrons.