A Quantum Diaries Survivor

The results of a new Supersymmetry search have been released a few days ago by the ATLAS collaboration. They come from an analysis of events with large missing transverse energy and jets -the most classical signature of SUSY at hadron colliders, as well as the most sensitive one in a wide range of the complicated space of SUSY parameters.

Ben Allanach is a professor of theoretical physics at the University of Cambridge. Before that he was a post-doc at LAPP (Annecy, France), CERN (Geneva, Switzerland), Cambridge (UK) and the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory (UK). I noticed a recent article of his in the arxiv, and asked him to report on it here, given the interest that the recent LHC results have stirred in the community. He graciously agreed.... So let us hear it from him!  Blimey, I'm tired. I'm also elated and excited and grateful to my lovely girlfriend, who's not only putting up with my long hours, distracted head and general ensuing grumpiness, she's even looking after me.

Both the CMS and ATLAS collaborations have already started to exclude meaningful regions of the parameter space of Supersymmetric models with the data they collected in 2010. And Physics World is on the news today with a online article by Kathy Mc Alpine, the famous rapper physicist who wrote the lirics and interpreted one of the biggest Youtube hits in the category of science popularization. If you have not watched it yet, please rush to do so now. Six million people (and counting) have done so before you already.

Today I spoke at a conference on "QCD advances" which is being held in Les Houches, an amiable small town near Chamonix, on the french slopes of Mont Blanc. The content of my talk is accessible from the conference web site, but I guess that I should provide here a summary of what I discussed.

Embarassingly overdue, the slides of my talk on "Heavy Flavour and Quarkonia Production in 7 TeV pp Collisions", meant for the 2011 Les Houches meeting on "Recent Advances in QCD" to be held next week near Chamonix, France, are slowly coming together. Since these days I seem to be straggling my feet on the blog as well, I decided to kill two birds with one stone. So here you are going to get a short overview of recent measurements of b-quark production by CMS. While providing the results for experts and beginners alike, I will try to make this discussion as simple as possible (but not simpler), something that lately I tend to forget. I do not like my blog posts to be too technical, but maybe I am getting old and my popularization powers are weakening. Let's see.

Now that the two articles I have worked on in the past two months are finalized, I think I can disclose where and when they will be published. In the March 2011 issue of Physics World you will find two back-to-back feature articles on the LHC in 2011. Author, yours truly.

A recent paper in the arxiv describes the observation, in 7 TeV proton-proton collisions produced by the LHC collider in the core of the LHCb detector, of a new decay mode of the particle called "B-sub-s", a meson which is a bound state of a anti-bottom-quark and an s quark.

A week ago a meeting was held in Chamonix to discuss in detail the schedule for the near future of the Large Hadron Collider, and to take a decision on the schedule, in particular for 2012.

This morning, as I walked out of home headed to work, the sky was clear and still dark. As I looked up, I immediately noticed the bright light of Venus above the houses of Venice. Have you ever watched Venus on a clear morning sky ? It is a marvelous sight! No wonder the planet was named after the most beautiful of all goddesses.My trip to the University, in Padova, begins with a 7-minute walk to the Venice train station, followed by a 40 minute ride and then a further 15-minute walk in Padova to reach the Physics Department. While on the train I usually busy myself with document editing on my laptop, but on my walks I use to try and put to work the other main CPU I have got - my brain.

While listening to highly interesting talks on cutting-edge statistical issues at PHYSTAT 2011, I have casually been reading this morning a paper recently posted on the arxiv, which was pointed out to me by a Cypriot friend, Alex (thanks, Alex!). The authors (J. Baglio,
A. Djouadi,
S. Ferrag,

When physicists working in a collaboration want to publish the observation of a new effect in the data, they need to first convince their peer that what they are observing is real, and not the product of a weird fluctuation.Statistical fluctuations are everywhere, and they sometimes do produce weird results. We are only human, and when facing unlikely fluctuations we are invariably tempted to interpret them as the manifestation of something new and unknown.

Thanks to the Tevatron Facebook account manager, R.M. (Ron, tell me if I can disclose your identity here), I can offer to you today an exceptional plot of historical significance.Before I paste below the plot in question, let me discuss what it is about. The Tevatron collider has operated since October 1985 -about a couple of geological eras back, in particle physics terms. The W and Z bosons were newborn babies back then, the top quark was thought to have a mass in the 30-50 GeV ballpark, and, to paraphrase the Rolling Stones, "Carlo Rubbia raged and the bodies stunk".