Physics

Unfortunately I was right: at least in predicting that the INFN exam dubbed "R5" would not go deserted. The R5 exam, which in exchange for a stressful pair of written tests (which I am trying to get a hold of, to report on it here) guaranteed nothing that the participants did not have beforehand  -a certification of readiness for a temporary position within INFN, which the institute cannot however offer, being short of cash-, saw the participation of 178 candidates among the about 350 who had submitted their application a couple of months ago. Barely more than half: this is a victory,…

"The INFN directorate may have invented the Identity operator in the space of qualifying exams" Guido Volpi (commenting on FB on the very offensive R5 exam held today by INFN post-docs).

The 2009 World Conference on Science Journalism took place last week in heat-wave-struck London, at the convenient location of Westminster Central Hall (see below). More than 900 delegates got together from 90 countries to discuss the future of science journalism, understand the challenges the field is facing, and finding strategies to face them. An impressive event, excellently organized. For me it was a rather new experience to participate in such a crowded conference, where not science, but its reporting, was discussed. I did not know any of the participants beforehand, but got to meet…

As I promised a week ago, I am posting answers to a few of the 42 questions which constituted the first part of an the exam selecting experimental particle physicists for the INFN (the italian institute of nuclear physics) four years ago. Next week, a similar exam will take place to "qualify" post-doctoral scientists which aspire at a temporary position with INFN. An explanation of why the new exam is a despicable idea is elsewhere; the full set of questions is here. In posting my answers, which are of course as cryptic to outsiders as are the questions themselves, I will try to provide some…

In a few days, scores of Italian post-doctoral researchers in experimental particle physics will get tested on their knowledge of the matter, without any promise of a position, but just to get one further "stamp" on their curriculum, testifying that they are competent enough to be worth offering a temporary position by INFN, the Italian Institute for (sub)Nuclear Physics. So this is a  national exam, with the sole purpose of giving a green light to be admitted to two-year positions , which are typically paid less than 1400 euros a month, and which are so far not available. Frankly, I…

From Prof. Chad Orzel's Graduation Speech: Science isn't a body of facts, science is a process for figuring out how the world works: you see something interesting, come up with an idea of why that might happen, and test you're idea to see if you're right. You repeat this process until you figure out why things happen the way they do, and then you use that knowledge to explain new things, or to do things that you couldn't do before. So, when I tell you to think like a scientist, what I'm saying is to use that process, which is something anybody can do. You don't need to be good at math, or…

If you have followed this blog for long enough, dear readers, the words "multi-muons", "anomalous muons", or even "lepton jets" are not foreign to you. They all refer to a paper appeared on the ArXiv on the evening of Halloween last year. In the paper the CDF collaboration published the results of a detailed analysis which described how a component of collider data containing two or more muons could not be explained by known Standard Model processes. Described as above, "a component not explained" is less than exciting; however, the peculiarities of the sample of events unearthed by CDF did…

In a few days italian post-docs working in high-energy physics will be asked to gather for a nasty exam, held by the INFN -the italian institute for nuclear physics- to qualify valiant researchers for future hiring in the institute. The exam generated a wave of outrage among the very pool of people at which it is aimed: the scores of "precari" (temporary workers) who are spending the best years of their life to try and make a career in particle physics.  Let me explain why that is so. In Italy the hiring system for physicists is troubled by the lack of funds and positions, the very low…

PrologueSome of you might remember the ripples caused in the blogosphere by the two-standard-deviation excess found by the CDF collaboration in their data in January 2007, while searching for a Higgs boson of the Minimal Supersymmetric extension of the Standard Model (MSSM). The search, led by my colleague physicist and blogger John Conway, had focused on the Higgs decay to a pair of tau leptons. To Conway's bewilderment, a small but nagging bump had indeed appeared in the invariant mass of two tau candidates in the data, corresponding to a Higgs mass of 160 GeV (right, in yellow). The story…

Below I offer a preview of the slides I will show tomorrow at an invited seminar on the rather technical topic of  "The b-jet energy calibration with Z-->bb decays", which I have come to CERN to give at a meeting of the LHCb collaboration. As I mentioned already in the first part of this two-part article, the topic is rather technical, and I do not expect a large audience -but I will nonetheless make an attempt at explaining the meaning of the slides pasted below. Then, of course, I am available to provide some additional light on any specific issue among those dealt below which you…