Amelia Fraser-McKelvie  is not a career researcher or a post-doctoral fellow or even in graduate school, but working on a summer scholarship at the Monash School of Physics, she conducted a…

The figure for you to guess which I posted two days ago is built with simulated events featuring the production, at the Tevatron collider, of a Z boson (decaying to electron-positron or muon-antimuon…

The Upsilon suppression paper by CMS is now public, and you can find it here. I decided to put an entry here since several people asked me to access the information... Note that this paper is a quite…

While the LHC runs like a swiss train and collects dozens of inverse picobarns a day, there's a celebration going on on the other side of the Atlantic, as this picture testifies: The folks pictured…

Upon being reminded by an automated messaging system, somewhat disturbingly, that today would be the birthday of an esteemed colleague -were he not dead- I decided to post a "guess the plot" entry…

The complex plane should be known as the Wessel plane, after the Norwegian-Danish land surveyor. His paper of 1799 was ignored because few were reading the preprint server at that time. Mr. Bookshop…

A few months ago LHC took a special run of proton-proton collisions at  2.76 TeV. Why the lower energy, now that we are accustomed to searching for new phenomena at the highest available energy…

Just a short post to mention that the Large Hadron Collider has reached tonight the top instantaneous luminosity of 1.075 * 10^33 cm^-2 s^-1. This is a new record for high-energy hadron colliders,…

The plot of the week is actually a table this week. A histogram with several background components can be extremely informative, but sometimes a table provides more detail and one can focus better on…

Quantum mechanics allows us to perform the following experiment (see the article by David Mermin in Physics Today Vol. 38 No. 4): The device at the center is used to launch a pair of particles in…