Physics

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,…

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.…

The technical details of Big Bang, inflationary cosmology, and selected alternative theories are on offer.  Popular accounts of the big bang theory, cosmic inflation, and the creation of the…

My physics department in Padova is not a huge place, and yet I usually fail to be aware of what goes on around, since I spend all of my time buried inside my office. This morning, though, I had to…

"To date, there is no evidence for SUSY particles and lower limits on the masses are more than 4 GeV for gluinos and more than 20 GeV for squarks and sleptons." D.H. Perkins, "Introduction to High-…

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-…

Today I spent the better part of the afternoon in the company of 150 high-school students at the Liceo Fermi in Padova, giving a seminar on particle physics in the context of a project called "…

Every two years physicists and astrophysicists who work in the area of neutrino physics get together in the wonderful setting of Palazzo Franchetti, a historical palace on the Canal Grande in Venice…

Everyday we rely on information transmitted through satellites. Some are close, orbiting just above the earth’s atmosphere, while others circle at a distance of 30 or 50 times further into space.…

I quickly wrote a short paper, "Broken Symmetries, Massless Particles and Gauge Fields", which described how gauge theories may evade the Goldstone theorem, and submitted it to Physics Letters. It…