Tau Identification At CMS With Neural Networks

by Giles Strong

Both the CMS and ATLAS collaborations are pretty vast, with around 5000 qualified scientist between them, and even more members working towards qualification. Everyone listed as ‘qualified’ will be listed as an author on any publication the collaboration produces, regardless of who actually did the major work for the analysis.

Physics Comes From Φύσις

by Tommaso Dorigo

This week I am in Pisa, where I have spent three days to discuss the status and the funding of accelerator-based experiments within the “first national scientific committee” of INFN. Yesterday all coordinators also met for dinner in a good fish restaurant. The discussion never departed much from physics, but it was certainly more relaxed and casual.

One thing that I heard reported by a colleague who has the pulse of public engagement in INFN was that the last “N” in my institute’s acronym causes sometimes a preconceived negative attitude in laypersons who hear

Muon G-2: The Anomaly That Could Change Physics

by Tommaso Dorigo

Do you remember the infamous “g-2” measurement ? The anomalous magnetic moment of the muon has been for over a decade in the agenda of HEP physicists, both as a puzzle and as a hope for good things to come.

Ever since the Brookhaven laboratories estimated the quantity at a value over 3 standard deviations away from the equally precise theoretical predictions, the topic (could the discrepancy be due to new physics??) has been commonplace in dinner table conversations among HEP physicists.

Similarly, no self-respected “global fit” of standard model observable quantities or scan of allowed parameter space of supersymmetric theories

600 Attend to Outreach Event in Venice Lido

by the AMVA4NewPhysics press office

On Saturday, July 8th, the “Sala Perla” of the Palazzo del Casinò was crowded by 600 attendees, who filled all seats and then some. The event, titled “Universo: tempo zero – breve storia dell’inizio”, was organized in conjunction with the international EPS conference, which takes place until this Wednesday at Lido of Venice, and was sponsored by the AMVA4NewPhysics network. It featured a discussion between the anchor, Silvia Rosa Brusin, and a few guests: Fabiola Gianotti, general director of CERN; Antonio Masiero, vice-president of INFN; and Mirko Pojer, responsible of operations of the LHC collider. The program was enriched by a few videos, and by readings by Sonia Bergamasco and jazz music by Umberto Petrin.

At the start of the evening, the Venice high-school students who won the “Art&Science” contest were given prizes (consumer electronics and gadgetry) offered by AMVA4NewPhysics as well as plaques with certificates. The winners, Martina Ciampi and Elena Murer, received in addition to the gadgets and the

Art & Science 39: Light’s Perspectives

by the AMVA4NewPhysics press office

Unlike previously understood, the last artwork by Venice high-school students featured in this blog, of a total of 39, is titled “Le prospettive della luce” (light’s perspectives). It is a video produced by Alberto Bentsik, Tommaso Moretti, and Samuele Tonello , students of the Liceo “G.B. Benedetti”. The students filmed themselves as they worked on a wooden board, and produced a high-speed video that shows their actions like in a movie from the nineteen-twenties. This allowed them to “document” their creative process, which is a bit mysterious as we only get to see them planting nails on the board and doing other slightly obscure operations on it. The board is shown below.

In the final frames of the video is shown the real result of their work – streaks of colour produced by red led lights shining on the board: that is their

Art & Science 38: Boson Motion

by the AMVA4NewPhysics press office

Elisa Brocca and Emma Troni, two students from Liceo “G.B. Benedetti”, are the authors of the video titled “Boson Motion”. The students captured the video as a succession of frames that try to picture the collision of two LHC protons with coloured balls, and to explain the motion of massive and massless particles in the presence of the Higgs boson field. The result is a fun animation.

The Art & Science contest is coming to a close, as tomorrow evening

Art & Science 37: The God Particle

by the AMVA4NewPhysics press office

Five of the 39 works produced by the high school students of Venice for the Art & Science contest are video recordings. In general, the footage recording skills of the students have been shown to be quite good. In the video presented here this is especially true: the product is quite well assembled, the perspectives and colours are chosen with care, and the result pleasing.

The students who produced the video are Filippo Baldan, Lorenzo Bottoni and Elia Mariotto, from the Liceo “G.B. Benedetti” in Venice. I must say that the creative process that led to this video, which allegedly started from the lectures on

Art & Science 36: Mental Limit

by the AMVA4NewPhysics press office

The work titled “Limite mentale” (mental limit) is the result of the artistic effort of Luca Seccarello and Nanni Visintin, students from the Liceo “G.B. Benedetti” of Venice who along with 70 more participated in the “Art & Science” contest organized by the AMVA4NewPhysics network in Venice as part of a bigger initiative of the “CREATIONS” EU network.

Two days now are left before the prize-giving event in “Sala Perla” at the Palazzo del Casinò of the Lido of Venice, where since

Art & Science 35: NGM

by the AMVA4NewPhysics press office

The work strangely titled “NGM” (it’s an acronym for the names of its three authors) is quite strange-looking, both for the choice of materials and for its visual appearance. The three high-school students who produced it (Nicolò Patrizio, Giovanni Felisi, Matteo Carraro), from the Liceo “G.B. Benedetti” of  Venice, explained that the choice of materials was at the very heart of their creative process.

Wood and copper were used to assemble a structure that remains a