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).
I just read with interest and awe the nice article appeared today in the arxiv about the search for dark matter annihilation in the sun's core by the Baksan Underground Scintillator Telescope (BUST), a facility operating since December 1978 (!) in the Caucasian valley of Baksan.
I am glad to see that the Higgs signal we have discovered last July continues to raise the interest of well-learned laypersons around the world. The confirmation this time comes from the fact that three readers of this blog have decided to challenge my bet that the two signals found by ATLAS in the gamma-gamma and ZZ decay modes, which presently have a discrepant measured mass, are no hint of two distinct resonances, but rather a systematic effect.
Occasional readers of this blog, I reckon, have time and again been left wondering what is the matter with these lower mass limits on new particles that physicists so copiously produce with their subnuclear physics experiments. How are they determined ? Why always lower mass limits and (almost) never upper limits ? And why do we care ?
It is with some delay that I decide to write about Aldo here. The reason is simply that after a house move I still have not been reconnected to the internet at home, and my absence from work for christmas holidays makes things even harder, and my presence online a sporadic break rather than a constant of motion.
Last week I spent my time playing in a strong chess tournament in Padova. The tournament had 50 participants, among which 11 grandmasters and 10 international masters, and was definitely the strongest event I took part in during my amateur chess career.
UPDATE: for more on this, I only now realize that my friend at Resonaances had written about it yesterday... It is nice to see that he agrees with my conclusions, anyway. Also Peter has news on it, and as usual additional links...---My ATLAS colleagues will have to pardon me for the slightly sensationalistic title of this article, but indeed the question is one which many inside and outside CERN are asking themselves upon looking into the new public material of ATLAS Higgs boson searches using the 2011 dataset in conjunction with the first part of 2012 data.
This is a post about basics. That's because I think a point needs to be made which is surprisingly not as well-known as its elementary nature would have you guess.Correlation -in its most used version, due to Pearson- is a measure of how two quantities can be observed to be in linear dependence on one another. It is a very common quantity to report the results of scientific studies, particularly but not exclusively in the social sciences. Researchers try to evidence the presence of a correlation between two phenomena as a preliminary step to investigating whether one can be the cause of the other.
In High-Energy Physics the small p-value of an observation may be the first hint of a discovery about to be made. Here by p-value I just mean the probability, just to be fancy (or brief). Because we rely on the assessment of the rarity of observations to decide whether we have discovered something or not, we physicists are (or should be) really careful with p-values. Today's article aims at demonstrating how easy it is to be carried away into giving more relevance to an observation than we should.
A new preprint is out in the arxiv today, detailing the results of a new analysis of neutrino speeds performed by the OPERA collaboration using proton spills of the CNGS beam produced during dedicated runs in May this year.
The conceptual design report of the Mu2E experiment at Fermilab is out in the arxiv for you to browse. Mind you - it is a rather thick document, 562 pages in all, so if all you have is 15' of lunch break you have better try something lighter.
Update: I got a confirmation that at the latest INFN board of directors meeting the news was given that the Super-B factory to be built outside Rome is no more. Super-B joins other remarkable projects in high-energy physics -notably the SSC, the American 40-TeV super-collider to be built in Texas, and killed by Congress in 1993- in the dust bin.With this move the Italian government shows again how little they care for basic research in Italy, and provides further fuel to the escape of bright researchers to other countries.
The top quark is the heaviest of the six known hadron constituents, discovered at the Fermilab Tevatron collider in 1995. Because of its quite large mass -over forty times more than the second-heaviest bottom quark- and because of a few additional interesting properties, the top quark has stimulated in the past two decades a large amount of theoretical work, well matched to the Tevatron investigations.In fact, one of the explicit goals of the CDF and DZERO experiments for Run II of the Tevatron, which lasted from 2002 to 2010, was to study extensively the top quark both as a standard model object, subjected as it is to electroweak interactions which can be studied and compared to predictions, and as a portal to new physics of various kinds.
