Physics

800x600 New Physics from Regularities of the Many Standard Model Free Parameters Presented at ICHEP2016 LHC results show no new physics at available energies and support further the Standard Model and increase the SM range of validity. It implicitly suggests to pay more attention to semi-empirical phenomenology for solving inner SM problems related especially to flavor sector and especially to neutrino physics. Large neutrino mixing phenomenon, Bimaximal at leading approximation, is “miraculously” similar to the data features of relatively large masses of Tau lepton and Top and Bottom quarks…

As explained in the first installment of this series, these questions are a warm-up for my younger colleagues, who will in two months have to pass a tough exam to become INFN researchers. In fact, now that the application period has ended, I can say that there have been 718 applications for 58 positions. That's a lot, but OTOH any applicants starts off with a one-in-12.4 chance of getting the job, which is not so terribly small. A disclaimer is attached at the bottom of this post.And now for questions number 10, 11, and 12. As always, your tentative solutions and / or comments are…

The ICHEP conference in Chicago is drawing to a close, and although I did not have the pleasure to attend it (I was busy with real work, you know ;-) I think I can post here some commentary of a few things I find interesting among the multitude of analyses and searches that were shown there. It goes without saying that the selection is biased by my personal interest, plus by my limited patience with peeking at talk slides. In fact, here I only cover one specific Higgs boson decay mode! But a digression first - and a digression on the digression Yet one thing I will not fail to mention for a…

The slope of a velocity-time graph is known to give the acceleration while the area under the graph speaks of the displacement of a body. This is some of the earliest physics students learn. Essentially, this is a simplification of the process of integration. The slope is the differentiation, and the area is the classic picture of how integration works as a computation of the areas of a series of rectangles:  Moving to a position-time, or displacement-time, graph now, we find that the differentiation bit still holds: the slope gives us the velocity, which is unsurprising. However, I…

So, by now we all know it - there is no 750 GeV resonance in LHC data. But will we ever learn the lesson ?The facts Let me start this post by recalling the bare facts, and a quick-and-dirty introduction for anybody who has been on the Moon in the last eight months or so. Last December, the CMS and ATLAS experiments at the CERN LHC collider presented in two back-to-back seminars their first results on data collected at unprecedented proton-proton collision energy of 13 TeV. The 60% higher center-of-mass energy with respect to collisions analized in the previous years left hopes alive for the…

As explained in the first installment of this series, these questions are a warm-up for my younger colleagues, who will in two months have to pass a tough exam to become INFN researchers.A disclaimer follows: I offer these questions as a self-test of one's knowledge in particle physics. I am not part of the INFN selection committee. I have no connection to the selection committee, nor any insider information on how the exam will be structured. All I know about it is what is contained in the official call, available to everybody. I do have some previous experience with INFN selections of…

800x600                 Geometric Contrast of Quark and Neutrino Mixing Hierarchies                                                                          …

As explained in the first installment of this series, these questions are a warm-up for my younger colleagues, who will in two months have to pass a tough exam to become INFN researchers.A disclaimer follows: I offer these questions as a self-test of one's knowledge in particle physics. I am not part of the INFN selection committee. I have no connection to the selection committee, nor any insider information on how the exam will be structured. All I know about it is what is contained in the official call, available to everybody. I do have some previous experience with INFN selections of…

As explained in the previous installment of this series, these questions are a warm-up for my younger colleagues, who will in two months have to pass a tough exam to become INFN researchers.A disclaimer follows: I offer these questions as a self-test of one's knowledge in particle physics. I am not part of the INFN selection committee. I have no connection to the selection committee, nor any insider information on how the exam will be structured. All I know about it is what is contained in the official call, available to everybody. I do have some previous experience with INFN selections…

As explained in the previous installment of this series, these questions are a warm-up for my younger colleagues, who will in two months have to pass a tough exam to become INFN researchers.A disclaimer is useful here. Here it is: I offer these questions as a self-test of one's knowledge in particle physics. I am not part of the INFN selection committee. I have no connection to the selection committee, nor any insider information on how the exam will be structured. All I know about it is what is contained in the official call, available to everybody. I do have some previous experience…