Physics

[ The first three entries of this live blogging series are available here (part 1) and here (part 2) and here (part 3)] 7.30 AM People have started flowing in the Main Auditorium. It seems things worked out well in the end - I can detect no drama. I must tell you that I have decided to use a more comfortable position to blog about the event: I have abandoned the idea of getting a lousy seat in the auditorium, with bad internet connection and no power outlet fit for my plug (dommage), and moved to one of the conference rooms of Building 40, the headquarters of ATLAS and CMS. From here I have…

[ The first two entries of this live blogging series are available here (part 1) and here (part 2) ] 7 AM. In thirty minutes the doors of the Main auditorium will open, and people will flood in. I have no idea whether it will be a tidy flow or a wild rush, but I suspect that the latter is more probable, given the strong feelings involved (people losing a night of sleep; the historical importance of the event; the young age and varied nationality of the people queueing up; the absence of suitable infrastructure to guide the queue). 7.20AM Will it be a model-independent discovery or a model-…

This is the second post of a series of blogs that I am writing this morning, July 4th, to describe the ongoing happenings at CERN, where at 9AM the Higgs boson Observation will be announced by the ATLAS and CMS collaborations. Please reload this page at 10 minute intervals if you want to hear the latest news, or see the previous entries. Entry 1 - Where's the queue ?6.30 AM Reading around in blogs (such as Peter's), I see the issue of "observation" versus "discovery". It is being argued that an "observation of a new particle means a weaker statistical significance of a "discovery-level" one.…

5.30 AM. Getting in at CERN through the B entrance I see no living soul. "Ha" -I tell myself- "I have been worrying too much". 5.36 AM. But the people is all here since last night ! There is a huge queue of 180 people already, extending from the doors of the Main Auditorium all the way up the aisle and back down on the other side. Most of the higgs enthusiasts have camped since last night here, and there is even a couple of guys with wide shoulders (but a polite smile) that direct newcomers to the end of the line. Here are a couple of pictures of the queue as of now: the head of the queue…

By now it's been written on so many newspapers and magazines -including Nature (the magazine, not the bitch)- that if a colleague of mine tries to reproach me for writing about the impending seminar at CERN, where ATLAS and CMS are vented to be showing observation-level signals of a new particle which smells like the Higgs and quacks like the Higgs, I will publically send him or her to hell. Besides, I have been cited as a "tease" in a nice summary which appeared in the Atlantic Wire site today. The line describing me (next to a picture that is N years old but which is dear to me for some…

Robbing the LHC experiments of media attention for 41 hours, the CDF and DZERO experiments are presenting today the results of their searches of the Higgs boson in the full datasets of proton-antiproton collisions acquired in the course of the last 10 years. You can follow the live streaming of the Tevatron seminar at this link. UPDATE: the live streaming is here. Below I will give some introductory notions on Higgs physics at the Tevatron; at the bottom of this post I am discussing the actual results. Introduction In the 2-TeV proton-antiproton collisions produced at the Tevatron in the…

Because Quaternions are things that act according to a general algebraic mathematical structure, they manifest themselves in a variety of ways in physics. The structure of Quaternion algebra is common knowledge and I refer the reader to wikipedia for the details. For the readers convenience, I'll quote what I consider to be the essentials here. Then I will ask questions that I will attempt to answer in the next blog. I would like my readers to answer or provide suggestions in the comment section too. This blog will contain nothing original other than the questions I ask. I am new to…

A very interesting paper appeared one week ago in the Arxiv. It is titled "Higgs Self-Coupling Measurements at the LHC", and it is authored by M.Dolan, C.Englert, and M.Spannovsky. The idea is that once and if a Higgs boson is found at the LHC, the next natural step of the research would be its characterization as a pure standard model object or a more complex, or just different, beast. Of course, once a signal were established, the LHC experiments would certainly want to measure all its properties as precisely as possible: mass, angular distributions, cross section in all the production…

I am endlessly amazed by observing, time and again, that even experienced colleagues fall in the simplest statistical traps. Mind you, I do not claim to be any better - sorry, let me rephrase: to have been any better in the early days of my career as an experimentalist. But then, I started to appreciate that to really understand physics results I needed to at least get familiar with a small set of notions in basic Statistics. So I insist that my colleagues should pay more attention to a few basic concepts. In this blog I have erratically tried to educate my readers on Statistics topics; but…

There is an important difference related to the mathematical formulation of Self-Field Theory (SFT) and that is the complete absence of gauge. We know from the various quantum theories that gauge plays a crucial role. To understand this difference we must first look at the basics of gauge theory. And to look at the basics of gauge theory we must first define some terms we have already used in discussing SFT. First let’s define Maxwell’s equations. _                    (1a)            …