Physics

As I am traveling around Europe this week, giving seminars in several places (Hamburg yesterday, Berlin today, and Clermont-Ferrand on Friday) my connectivity is erratic and my capability to follow the development of data analysis and new publications is strongly lowered. My connections to the world of LHC research continues through email exchanges, though. One thread I found in my mailbox this morning developed from a question on the use and meaning of the so-called "Brazil Bands", a feature of commonly used plots that summarize the searches for new phenomena. They have become ubiquitous in…

800x600 From Data: -- Neutrinos are Related to Geometry Unique Particles Positively suggested by empirical data equation for neutrino mixing angles cos2 (2θ12) + cos2 (2θ23) + cos2 (2θ13) = 1+ sin2 (2θ13) surely defines a beyond the SM fundamentally new physics flavor neutrino feature – duality relation at leading approximation (sin2(2θ13) = 0) between bimaximal hierarchy of neutrino mixing angles and Euclidean 3-space geometric symmetry bimaximal hierarchy of oscillating flavor neutrino momentum-vector direction angles in a singled-out by spacial geometry coordinate system (Z-axis…

The DZERO collaboration published earlier this year a search for resonances decaying to pairs in its Run-2 dataset of 2-TeV proton-antiproton collisions, produced by the now defunct Tevatron collider in the first 10 years of this century. Starting from a sample of about 5600 B_s events, they surprisingly claimed observation of a rather wide resonance at 5.57 GeV, with a statistical significance of 5.1 standard deviations. This could be interpreted as a "tetraquark" state. The signal is shown in the figure below (right), where the bottom panel show the residuals of data minus a fit that…

I am told that when a patient is diagnosed with a terminal illness, he or she will likely go through a well-defined sequence of stages. The first stage is Denial: the patient will convince him- or herself that there is a mistake in the diagnosis, that somehow the doctors are wrong, or something alike. It is a protective, visceral reaction, one preventing the shock of reckoning with a completely altered landscape. There follows a state of Anger: the "why me" sentiment is the cause of this state of mind. Then there is Fear, brought about by the lack of knowledge of what is coming. Then…

800x600 Crazy Enough to Be True?     According Einstein and in agreement with recent approach of S. Weinberg, it must be ‘something’ in the outer space that parallels the quantum wave function Psi(x, y, z) in places where it is not zero. In terms of classical physics this something must be described by the metaphor “nonlocal”.   Is it possible to answer the question “what may it be” in the framework of the theoretical ideas already developed in the history of quantum mechanics? Probably, the answer is yes. It is by analogy with Dirac’s initial strange physics-…

The book "Anomaly! Collider physics and the quest for new phenomena at Fermilab" is about to be published, after a somewhat long and anti-climatic wait. And the first presentation events are being scheduled here and there.If you are at CERN I hope I will see you at the CERN library (bldg 52) on November 29th, at 4PM. The book should already be available for retail by then. On that occasion I will just chat a little about the contents, answer questions, and maybe read one or two paragraphs to those of you who will come by. The event is detailed in this indico page. In the meantime, you could…

A new paper by the ATLAS collaboration at the CERN Large Hadron Collider produces results in good agreement with standard model predictions: the unitarity of the cross section of the vector-boson scattering process, one of the original reasons for invoking the Higgs mechanism, has been tested by directly searching for electroweak production of W boson pairs associated with two forward-going hadronic jets. The energy dependence of the rate of the considered process provides information on whether the unitarity-restoring action of the Higgs boson is total, as the standard model predicts, or…

Back to my office in Padova, I am looking back at last week's travel around the US and the two talks I delivered at SLAC (the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center) and Northwestern University.  The event at SLAC was an experimental seminar. Due to a clash with a "Higgs coupling" workshop that was taking place at the same time, it did not attract a very large audience. Still, it was quite nice to meet a few of the SLAC scientists there, and in particular to chat with Stan Brodsky, a well-known theorist whom I had met in Valparaiso earlier this year. I am also grateful to Brandon Eberly, my…

As the 23 faithful readers of this blog already know, I recently wrote a book that describes the searches for new physics undertaken by a glorious particle physics experiment, CDF, during the eighties and nineties. The book, titled "Anomaly! Collider physics and the quest for new phenomena at Fermilab", is coming out at the end of November. More information and reviews on the book can be obtained at this link. Or you can directly pre-order the book via AMazon by following the link on the right column here (you may have to scroll down) --> Loosely connected with the above are a few seminars…

The mystery of what clumps galaxy clusters together, and provides for a quarter of the matter-energy budget of the universe, really looks like _the_ most important scientific question we face today. There is nowadays compelling evidence of the correctness of the standard cosmological model, coming from the cosmic microwave background maps provided lastly by Planck as well as from a number of other observations - of supernovae, galaxy clusters, galaxy rotation curves, etcetera. So we know there has to be dark matter out there. But what is it? 10 years ago many of my colleagues, experimental…