Physics

800x600 Metaphors in Quantum Mechanics   Quantum mechanics describes fundamental natural phenomena that are not accessible for direct human perception. Not surprisingly, it appears from empirical data that QM phenomena (quantum world) are just not compatible with classical images, notions, relations created by perceptions of ‘classical world’ directly accessible to human senses. The undeniable fully natural empirical fact is that the quantum world cannot be expressed in terms of the classical world language. The only solution found by great physicists (Schrodinger, Heisenberg,…

UPDATE: before you read the text below, one useful bit of information. The author of the analysis described below is not a member of ALEPH since 2004. He got access to the data as any of you could, since the ALEPH data is open access by now. There would be a lot to discuss about whether it is a good thing (I think so) or not that any regular joe or jane can take collider data and spin it his or her own way and claim new physics effects, but let's leave it for some other post. What is important is that ALEPH is not behind this publication, and members of it have tried to explain to the author…

Last August 27 a full-day outreach event was held in the nice small town of Veroia, in northern Greece, as one of the satellite activities to the international conference “Quark Confinement and the Hadron Spectrum” which took place in Thessaloniki during the following days. As the AMVA4NewPhysics network I coordinate sponsored the conference, of course I am proud to report here that the outreach event in Veroia was a real success – as testified also by an article published on “To Bhma”, a Greek newspaper. Below is a snapshot of the title of the article, available also here. The…

800x600 Nonzero Theta13 and Neutrino Mixing Deviation from Bimaximal Geometric Symmetry    Science is a human enterprise facing primary Nature. As a result, beside successfully created (by physicists) theories, mistakes happen and also serendipitous achievements that carry deep physical meaning. By that reasoning, meaningful discoveries can be made by ordinary people, physicists-thinkers, though with much less probability than by geniuses.                        …

Last December, when the ATLAS and CMS experiments gave two bacl-to-back talks at the end-of-the-year LHC "physics jamboree" in the CERN main auditorium, the whole world of particle physics was confronted with a new question nobody had seen coming: could a 750 GeV particle be there, decaying a sizable fraction of the time into pairs of energetic photons? What new physics could account for it? And how to search for an experimental confirmation in other channels or phenomena? As those of you who have followed the proceedings know, the answer on the existence of the phantomatic 750 GeV boson was…

The text below is part of a chapter of "Anomaly!" which I eventually removed from the book, mainly due to the strict page limit set by my publisher. It is a chapter that discusses the preparations for Run 2 of the Fermilab Tevatron, which started in 2002 and lasted almost 10 years. There were many, many stories connected to the construction of the CDF II detector, and it is a real pity that they did not get included in the book. So at least I can offer some of them here for your entertainment... [A disclaimer: the text has not been proofread and is in its initial, uncorrected state.] By the…

The first few copies of my new book, “Anomaly! – Collider Physics and the Quest for New Phenomena at Fermilab” arrived this morning from Singapore. With pleasure, I was finally able to hold in my hand the result of a long work… It started in 2008, when the unfolding story of a intriguing multi-muon signal in CDF data had me first caress the idea of writing about two decades of investigations carried out by some of my colleagues in the experiment, in the relentless search of new physics. The book is much more than that, of course – the project grew to become a history of the experiment,…

The INFN exam for nuclear and subnuclear physicists, to select 58 new researchers, took place on September 19th (first test) and 20th (second test) in Rome. Two different locations for the two tests were set up as the number of candidates who enrolled in the selection were 720, a too large number to manage in a single location. Having some experience of this kind of exams, I wrote a few blog posts here, aimed at training would-be researchers with typical questions - or at least, ones that I would have put in a selection test if I had been one of the examiners. You can find these at the…

800x600 Neutrino Mixing CP-violating Phenomenology with only Two Free Parameters The flavor-geometric semi-empirical phenomenology appears a powerful source of new basic ideas in the Standard Model Flavor Sector. Most recent new idea is CP-nonconservation as cause of deviation from exact Euclidean 3-space geometric symmetry of neutrino bimaximal approximation. It is represented by cos-squared Dirac CP-phase (CPph) [1. ResearchGate/L, 9/16], cos^2(2θ12) +cos^2(2θ23) + cos^2(2θ13) = 1 + cos^2(CPph), (1) so that maximal value (CPph) = pi/2 is related to the exact geometric bimaximal (θ13 = 0)…

Yesterday I read with interest and curiosity some pages of a book on the search and discovery of the Higgs boson, which was published last March by Rizzoli (in Italian only, at least for the time being). The book, authored by physics professor and ex CMS spokesperson Guido Tonelli, is titled "La nascita imperfetta delle cose" ("The imperfect birth of things"). The title is quite unrevealing of the contents, and Rizzoli did well in putting a band around the book, to explicitate its topic. Indeed, the graphics on the cover are HEP-inspired, yet quite abstract; one could well fail…