Physics

In the previous post I mentioned a research project that I was about to conclude, centered on the detection of anomalies in multidimensional data. Here I would like to give some more detail of that research, as the article I wrote on the subject is now publically accessible in the Cornell preprint arXiv (and is being sent to a refereed journal).Collider detectors collect information from subnuclear particle reactions by taking snapshots of the particles that get radiated from the collision point, through a number of different devices that record the interaction those particles entertain with…

Usually, when we talk about our research we discuss things we have recently published, highlighting the importance or novelty of their contribution to the advancement of human understanding or knowledge of the specific field of Science we work on.  So it is only normal for me to try and go against that particular cliché here, and talk about things I will publish in the future. Admittedly, it is a bit of a mine field (it is never easy to be an anticonformist), but I will try to avoid stepping on the most obvious triggers (violations of confidentiality, scooping risks, impossible promises…

The CMS Collaboration submitted for publication last week a nice new result, where proton-proton collisions data collected by the experiment during the past run of the Large Hadron Collider were scanned in search of very peculiar events featuring a weak boson (W or Z) along with two energetic photons. The rate of these rare processes was measured and found in good agreement with predictions of the Standard Model of particle physics. Now that you have read the above abstract, I wonder what else can I say here to keep your interest up. Indeed, weak bosons have been discovered 38 years ago, and…

When one thinks about chemistry, one doesn't usually consider quantum mechanics to play a part. Yet it does. When it boils down to it, all matter is a combination of a handful of subatomic particles and the forces holding them together. Chemistry, is in essence, applied physics. For decades, scientists have been trying to determine how to follow a chemical reaction from its initial state through all of its quantum states to its products. The hope was that, by doing so, researchers could understand the quantum dynamics that drive these reactions. Until now, it has mostly been speculation.…

The title of this post coincides with the one of a scientific report which was submitted for publication in Reviews in Physics last Sunday; and it is also the meaning of the acronym "AMVA4NewPhysics", the name of an European Union-funded Innovative Training Network I directed as scientific coordinator from 2015 to 2019. The article, which is 95 pages long, is available in the arXiv here. It is a very nice review of important advancements in analysis methods produced with a contribution from members of the AMVA4NewPhysics ITN, and it encompasses advancements in b-tagging methods, matrix-…

While exchanging ideas with a dear colleague of mine on possible applications of differentiable programming to the optimization of the design of detection instruments, I came about an interesting, crazy idea which, since I do not have enough time to investigate at the moment, is only suitable for this blog.  The rationale is that if it is a viable, patentable idea worth something, once it is published here it becomes of public knowledge and hence non-patentable anymore... Which in turn means nobody owns it, and it can be exploited without problem, like the Salk vaccine.Of course if you…

A few weeks ago I was interviewed by Katrin Link for APPEC, the Astro-Particle Physics European Consortium. APPEC is a consortium of 19 funding agencies, national government institutions, and institutes from 17 European countries, which is responsible for coordinating and funding national research efforts in astroparticle physics.  The interview stems from the help that the JENAA group (a joint effort of APPEC, NuPECC and ECFA) is trying to offer to the research plan of the MODE collaboration, a group of physicists and computer scientists for which I am serving as the scientific…

Design and purpose are definitely not two things that scientists consider as their guiding ideas in trying to decypher the fabric of our Universe, or of natural phenomena in general. So teleology should not belong to this blog, I agree. Yet note that this was not always so - for much of human history, the progress of science walked on a thin line to avoid falling into heresy, on one side, while trying to retain its disdain for dogmas and preconceived notions of a creator, and of a supernatural sphere that could not be empirically accessed. But in the XXIth century, it is religion that fights…

At the end of the 17th century, Sir Isaac Newton scientifically showed the motion of the planets around the sun through a law of universal gravitation.  He also explained the motion of the moon. Yet since both the earth and the sun determine the motion of the moon, Newton became interested in predicting the motion of three bodies moving in space under the influence of their mutual gravitational attraction, a problem that later became known as “the three-body problem”.  He did not succeed in creating a a general mathematical solution for it. The three-body problem was easy to…

Today the University of Padova has issued a call for Ph. D. positions to start in October 2021, and the Department of Physics and Astronomy has 23 new openings. The English version of the call page is here. This year, besides being as always available to be a supervisor for Ph.D. students interested in research in particle physics with the CMS experiment at the CERN LHC, as well as for general studies of applications of advanced Machine Learning techniques to particle physics problems (see at the bottom for three available lines of research which I offer to supervise students on), I have…