Physics

Final results of searches for particles decaying to photon pairs in 2015 data keep hopes alive for imminent ground-breaking discovery On December 15th last year, as the physics coordinators of the ATLAS and CMS collaborations showcased the results of their new searches, particle physicists around the world held their breath. Both experiments showed preliminary results from the analysis of LHC data acquired during 2015 at 13 TeV. That unprecedented energy made the potential for new discoveries high. Among a wealth of interesting results one in particular stood out, hinting at the possible…

Today, while Americans set up their barbecues and prepare to celebrate their Independence, particle physicists around the world have a different reason to celebrate. Four years ago today is when the Higgs boson got officially declared a confirmed new particle in the subatomic zoo. Discovering a new particle is an act of trust. You trust that the data cannot have played you such a dirty trick as to show a five-sigma departure from the "no-new-particle" model. Five sigma is considered a very safe threshold: you can be wrong on average only once in three million times. As we regularly catch…

As my blogging here has been erratic in the last couple of weeks, I feel I need to explain to my 23 readers (what citation is this BTW?) what I have been up to. So this post does not contain any physics, and is rather about how a physicist fights for some space and time for himself and his family, decoupled from his daily occupations, and hopefully lowers his stress level. I left my home in Venice on June 15th at four in the morning with my fiancee and my two kids (Filippo, 17 and Ilaria, 13 years old), headed  to Elafonisos, a tiny island in southern Greece. Our Volotea flight was…

The top quark is the heaviest known subatomic particle we may call "elementary", i.e. one we describe as a point-like object; it weighs a full 66% more than the Higgs boson itself! Top was discovered in 1995 by the CDF and DZERO collaborations at the Fermilab Tevatron collider, which produced collisions between protons and antiprotons at an energy 7 times smaller than that of the proton-proton collisions now provided by the Large Hadron Collider at CERN.The top is produced mainly in pairs in these energetic collisions. And then the two particles -to be precise I should say the "particle-…

Current quantum physical models treat Hilbert spaces, function theory and differential calculus and integral calculus as separate entities. In the past nothing existed that directly relates these ingredients, which together constitute the quantum physical model. Thus, a need exists for a methodology that intimately binds these ingredients into a consistent description of the structure and the phenomena that occur in the model.  Quaternions can store progression and spatial location in a single data element. Quaternionic Hilbert spaces are no more and no less than structured storage media…

==This is an early document. The insights of the author have refined. See the Wikiversity Hilbert Book Model Project for a more recent interpretation== Quantum physics applies Hilbert spaces as the realm in which quantum physical research is done. However, the Hilbert spaces contain nothing that prevents universe from turning into complete chaos. Quantum physics requires extra mechanisms that ensure sufficient coherence. Reality has built-in principles. If you understand these built-in principles, then these principles teach a lesson. The foundation of reality already supports the built-in…

I am happy to announce here that a session on "Statistical Methods for Physics Analysis in the XXI Century" will take place at the "Quark Confinement and the Hadron Spectrum" conference, which will be held in Thessaloniki on August 28th to September 3rd this year. I have already mentioned this a few weeks ago, but now I can release a tentative schedule of the two afternoons devoted to the topic.Statistics is used every day in data analysis by particle physics collaborations: our results are entirely dependent on the application of statistical methods, from very simple ones to cutting-…

800x600 800x600 Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman",serif;} Publication censorship of new physics ideas – a sort of pseudo-science         …

I am spending some time today at the Altarelli Memorial Symposium, which is taking place at the main auditorium at CERN. The recently deceased Guido Altarelli was one of the leading theorists who brought us to the height of our understanding of the Standard Model of particle physics, and it is heart-warming to see so many colleagues young and old here today - Guido was a teacher for all of us.Riccardo Barbieri (ETH Zurich) had a talk of the LEP era where he focused on some of the contributions of Altarelli to the derivation of  Standard Model predictions for the masses of the top quark…

I have recently put a bit of order into my records of activities as a science communicator, for an application to an outreach prize. In doing so, I have been able to take a critical look at those activities, something which I would otherwise not have spent my time doing. And it is indeed an interesting look back.The blogging Overall, I have been blogging continuously since January 4th 2005. That's 137 months! By continuously, I mean I wrote an average of a post every two days, or a total of about 2000 posts, 60% of which are actual outreach articles meant to explain physics to real outsiders…