Physics

MicroBooNE did not find the sterile neutrino which it was designed to instead it found the absence of the sterile neutrino. That too is finding something. In fundamental research sciences we learn both by what we find and do not find. To make a prediction and falsify it also advances science by eliminating possibilities. Gradually we can zero in on what is possible. For the non-physicist what is a sterile neutrino. We can define the sterile neutrino ass being a neutrino which lack something all known neutrinos have. In certain nuclear interactions that involved the electron (e) there was a…

This past Thursday I held a public lecture, together with my long-time friend Ivan Bianchi, on the topic of Art and Artificial Intelligence. The event was organized by the "Galileo Festival" in Padova, for the Week of Innovation.Ivan is a professor of Contemporary Art at the University of Padova. We have known each other since we were two year olds, as our mothers were friends. We took very different career paths but we both ended up in academic and research jobs in Padova, and we have been able to take part together in several events where art and science are at the focus. Giving a lecture…

I believe oceans of ink were spent, ever since pens were a thing, writing on the mentor-student relationship, its do's and don'ts, and the consequences of deviations from proper practice. And rightly so, as the balancing act required for a proper, effective teaching action is entirely non trivial. The fact that our didactical systems and academia are in constant evolution, that rules and courses formats change over time, and that as humans we tend to forget what has been learnt in the past (on good practice, I mean), require us to keep thinking about the topic, and continue to keep the…

I very much would like to write about the Nobel prize in physics here today, but I realize I cannot really pay a good service to the three winners, nor to my readers, on that topic. The reason is, quite bluntly, that I am not qualified to do that without harming my self-respect. Also, I never knew about the research of two of the winners.  As for the third, I do know Giorgio Parisi's research in qualitative terms, and I happen to know him personally; well, at least we are Facebook friends, as maybe 500 of his contacts can also claim - plus, he once invited me to a symposium at the…

The Corfu Summer Institute is a well-established institution for higher education, run since the paleolithic by the inexhaustible George Zoupanos, the soul of the whole thing. Generations of physicists have been trained in doctoral schools and conferences there over the past few decades. Of course the beauty of the island, set in the Ionian sea and green from the top of its mountains to the blue sea below, has helped to keep the events there well-attended, and even during the pandemic the events have been run in person. This year, besides other schools and workshops, a school in quantum…

I used some spare research funds to open a six-months internship to help my research group in Padova, and the call is open for applications at this site (the second in the list right now, the number is #23584). So here I wish to answer a few questions from potential applicants, namely:1) Can I apply? 2) When is the call deadline?3) What is the salary?4) What is the purpose of the position? What can I expect to gain from it? 5) What will I be doing if I get selected?  Answers:1 - You can apply if you have completed a masters degree in a scientific discipline (physics, astronomy,…

When you collide particles made up of quarks and gluons, such as the protons accelerated by the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, you mostly expect particles made of quarks and gluons to emerge. That is because quarks and gluons most of the times interact by the strong interaction, which is itself mediated by the exchange of gluons; and the strong interaction knows nothing about all the other matter and interaction fields.So how do you get energetic electrons, muons, photons, and weak bosons from a LHC collision? Well, the electroweak interaction which may produce these particles does play in,…

News reports have thundered that we have detected dark energy, others have reported that we may have detected dark energy. The difference being that the reporters either read the title or they read the abstract which qualified the title. Odds are most reporters did not read the body as even a working physicist would have to study this paper for quite a while to understand all it says. Something which I may do since the work “Direct detection of dark energy: The XENON1T excess and future prospects” CITATION Vag21 \l 1033  (Vagnozzi, et al. 2021) published in Physical Review D is a…

Today I am giving the opening speech at a workshop with the same title of this post. The workshop takes place at the Center for Particle Physics and Phenomenology of Université catholique de Louvain, in Belgium, and it is in a mixed formula - we will have 33 in-person attendees and 72 more attending by videolink. The workshop is organized by the MODE collaboration, which I lead. It is a small group of physicists and computer scientists from 10 institutions in Europe and America, who have realized how today's deep learning technology allows us to raise the bar of our optimization tasks -…

In the third part of this long piece on graphical displays and their interpretation, I wish to discuss some properties of two-dimensional distributions, which are sometimes called "scatterplots" (especially by physicists), or also "temperature plots" (when colour is used to give a sense of the density of data in the two-dimensional plane). In this post we will consistently label "X" the variable on the horizontal axis, and "Y" the variable on the vertical axis, but there is no hierarchy between them - they should be considered equally important.In all cases, these graphs are rich with…