Two years ago I used the combined Higgs search limits produced by the D0 experiment to evaluate how well the Tevatron was doing if compared with the predictions that had been put together by the 1999 SUSY-HIGGS working group, and later by the 2003 Higgs Sensitivity Working Group (HSWG), two endeavou...

The paper by Thomas Gehrmann and collaborators I cited a few days ago has inspired me to have a closer look at the problem of understanding the features of extensive air showers - the phenomenon of a localized stream of high-energy cosmic rays originated by the incidence on the upper atmosphere of a...

In this post -the fourth of a series (previous parts: part I, part II, and part III)- I wish to discuss a couple of attributes possessed by the “ghost” events unearthed by the CDF multi-muon analysis. A few months have passed since the publication of the CDF preprint describing that resu...

To start 2009 with a tidy desk, I wish to put some order in the posts about particle physics I wrote in 2008. By collecting a few links here, I save from oblivion the most meaningful of them -or at least I make them just a bit more accessible. In due time, I will update the “physics made easy&...

The regulars here will have already noticed by now that my posting rate has fallen this week. I have been busy with three different physics analyses, trying to make some progress in each. The first project is the calibration of the momentum scale in CMS. I have discussed the issue elsewhere a couple...

I had the pleasure of seeing Nima Arkani-Hamed -an IAS/Harvard University theoretician- visit this blog this morning. Nima, together with some colleagues, published three weeks ago a couple of papers where they discussed the possibility that hadron colliders put in evidence a signature of new physic...

NB: This post is aimed at physicists.. However if you are not one, but you are really curious, you might find out that for once the annoying feeling of reading cryptic jargon is paid back by some real news! I guess the most important message of the post you are about to read is: Do not check the arx...

Sometimes I come to think I need a secretary, or even better, a press office. It is such a tough job to keep up to date with the scientific publications popping out on a daily basis, that I sometimes have to completely leave my research aside to foster my own education. When, however, a new importan...

A recent analysis by CDF, based on 2 inverse femtobarns of data (approximately 160 trillion proton-antiproton collisions) has searched for events featuring a rare mixture of striking objects: high-energy photons, significant missing transverse energy, and energetic b-quark jets. Photons at a proton-...

The skies are smoggy over the Bay Area this morning, as a fire in Butte County — the northernmost of the pins on the map to the left — burns near Paradise. No, really, that’s the town’s name. The area burned as recently as 2003, when over 200 dwellings went up in smoke. Winds...