A Quantum Diaries Survivor

I have no energy today to put together a detailed discussion of a brand new, exciting search for supersymmetric Higgs boson performed in data collected by the CDF experiment at the Tevatron proton-antiproton collider. All I can do for you is to show the interesting result of the search, and give you some very general ideas of what this is and why it is interesting. Maybe tomorrow or Saturday I will be able to pay more justice to the analysis.

2010 has just started with the best auspices to bring us exciting new science, and there comes a pledge to forecast what will happen in 2020. Oh, well - rest is not what I became a scientist for.Making non-trivial predictions today for how will basic research be in subnuclear physics ten years down the line is highly non-trivial. For exactly the opposite reason that it is equally hard in several other fields of research.

The success of today's particle physics experiments relies to a surprisingly large extent on a seldom told functionality of the giant apparata that detect the faint echoes of subatomic particles hitting or punching through their sensitive regions: the capability of triggering.

The CDF Collaboration has recently produced a new analysis of proton-antiproton collisions at the now second-world-best collision energy of 1.96 TeV. They searched for very rare decays of the B mesons, particles composed of, would you guess, a b-quark and a lighter partner orbiting around each other.

Today's visit to the Cornell Arxiv, the repository where scientific papers on physics, astrophysics, mathematics, and a few other disciplines are made publically accessible before getting published on paper, was a productive one. Some casual browsing allowed me to learn a few random things on topics I know little or nothing about; but what really made my day was reading study by a few distinguished theorists (Vernon Barger, Wai-Yee Keung, and Brian Yencho), who considered a collider signature I had been fantasizing about in the past.

Being capable of asking the right question is a crucial skill. Dick Feynman tells a story in his book, "Surely you're joking, mr. Feynman": at a meeting with a bunch of military big shots he is shown the blueprint of a building meant to store radioactive material, he sees a symbol that he guesses represents a ventilation opening in the wall, and risking his reputation points the finger at it, asking what happens if the opening is occluded. The question turns out to be right on the money, and as a result his reputation gets a boost, plus the building does not blow up.

After re-emerging from a rather debilitating new years' eve banquet, I feel I can provide my own answers to the second batch of physics questions I proposed a few days ago to the most active readers of this column. Be sure about one thing: the answers to the three questions have already been given in some form by a few of the readers in the comments thread; I will nonetheless provide my own explanations, and in so doing I might pick a graph or two to illustrate better the essence of the problems. But first, there was a bonus question included in the package, and nobody found the solution to it. Here is the bonus question again:"What do you get if you put together three sexy red quarks ?"The answer is

Okay, the year is not over just yet, but it is already time for a little accounting of the traffic on this site in the course of the last eight-and-a-half months -that is, since I moved my blog to Scientific Blogging.For this year's summary I have been inspired in part by Alex Antunes, who decided to pick his least read articles to draw some conclusions about what really does not sell well here. But I have of course also given a close look at what appears to appease your taste, dear readers.

The turnaround of the three physics questions I offered a few days ago, to stimulate your neurons and extract you from the chocolate and alcohol flood caused by the usual string of Christmas parties and dinners, was rather scarce. Despite that, I wish to repeat the offer today, making some adjustments to reach a wider public. The questions I offer here are easier but still not accessible to everybody. However, my plans are that at least the answers I will give in a couple of days will be understandable. Further, anyone can try the bonus question I ask at the bottom of this piece...

Two days ago I offered you three problems in experimental particle physics, of varied complexity. Three readers tried answering the test in the comments thread: a rather underwhelming turnaround, but what did I expect - we are deep in Christmas vacations after all. I will give below my own answers to the questions, and then comment some of those I received. For ease of reading, I paste here again the three questions.

Scared by the void of Christmas vacations ? Unable to put just a few more feet between your mouth and the candy tray ? Suffocating in the trivialities of the chit-chat with relatives ? I have a solution for you. How about trying to solve a few simple high-energy physics quizzes ? I offer three questions below, and you are welcome to think any or all of them over today and tomorrow. In two days I will give my answer, explain the underlying physics a bit, and comment your own answers, if you have been capable of typing them despite your skyrocketing glycemic index.

Yesterday morning Venice awoke in the middle of a snowstorm. It is a very rare phenomenon to see snow in sizable amounts in the island, and the times that I have seen four inches build up on the ground are probably no more than a handful.But the morning was also marked by another phenomenon -less unusual, but still rare: a strong acqua alta. The sea rose to 1.15 meters above its average level, and flooded calli and campi with up to ten inches of water.