Physics

[The title of this article comes from a T-shirt with ten advices on what to do when everything else fails] It has always surprised me to realize how confident we physicists are of the good faith of…

"The cusp in the dark matter distribution required to explain the recently found excess in the gamma-ray spectrum at energies of 130 GeV in terms of the dark matter annihilations cannot survive the…

"Oh Wind, if Winter comes, can Spring be far behind ?" Good old Shelley inspired me to start today's article with the above verse, taken from his magnificent "Ode to the West Wind". With the weather…

Calibration does not always mean fixing a device, it sometimes means adjusting to solve a problem.  In the early years of America, the famous Kentucky longrifles that conquered the frontier (and…

The results of a third-party investigation of Rossi's E-CAT reactor have appeared on the Cornell arxiv, and the conclusions of the tests are at the very least startling: An experimental investigation…

"New Physics can appear at any moment but it is now conceivable that no new physics will show up at the LHC" Guido Altarelli, LHC Nobel Symposium, May 15th 2013 It is funny reading the above quote if…

Hofstadter's Butterfly, a complex pattern of the energy states of electrons that resembles a butterfly, has appeared in physics textbooks as a theoretical concept of quantum mechanics for nearly 40…

Finally the decay of Higgs bosons to b-quark pairs is emerging from LHC data, too. That decay mode is the highest-probability one - about four out of five Higgs bosons will prefer to yield b-quarks…

Supersymmetry, the extension of the Standard Model of particle physics that was once sold as an almost certain discovery that the LHC experiments would bump into upon starting to collect proton-…

In 1992 the top quark had not been discovered yet, and it did not make much sense for the CDF collaboration to have a full meeting devoted solely to it; rather, analyses targeting the search of the…