Advanced Results in Lisbon

by Tommaso Dorigo

This week the VII AMVA4NewPhysics workshop is under way in the premises of LIP in Lisbon. During these events the network gets together to discuss the status of the various projects, plan future events and activities, take action on arisen issues, and vote on budget and other topics. But this is a special event in the lifetime of the network, as we are getting toward the mature stage – we are in the 

Higgs Hacking

by Giles Strong

A few days before I returned from CERN at the beginning of the month, I attended a talk on the upcoming TrackML challenge. This is a competition beginning this month in which members of the public will be invited to try and find a solution to the quite tricky problem of accurate reconstruction of particle trajectories in the collisions at the LHC. The various detectors simply record the hits where particles pass by, however to make use of this data, the hits in surrounding detector layers must be combined into a single flight path, called a track.

Things that Decay into Boson Pairs

by Tommaso Dorigo

Writing a serious review of research in particle physics is a refreshing job – all the things that you already knew on that specific topic once sat on a fuzzy cloud somewhere in your brain, and now find their place in a tidily organized space, with clear interdependence among them. That’s what I am experiencing as I progress with a 60-pageish thing on hadron collider searches for diboson resonances, which will appear sometime next year in a very high impact factor journal.

One of the things that the review must cover is a theoretical overview of the models that the searches for these physics processes address. So I thought I would say a few words on this topic here – but bear in

Grandma’s Higgs bosons

by Alexander Held

Last month, I had the pleasure to attend the 2017 edition of the European School of High-Energy Physics in Évora, Portugal. We were about 100 students, including my fellow ESR Pablo. The two week program included lectures on many high-energy physics-related topics, such as the Standard Model, cosmology, statistics, Higgs physics, and phenomena beyond the Standard Model.

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Higgs

by Seng-Pei Liew

Recently we have witnessed the birth of gravitational-wave astronomy, as gravitational waves were directly observed for the first time. Subsequently, gravitational waves due to binary neutron star merger were detected along with associated electromagnetic events, opening a new era of multi-messenger astronomy.

The Night of European Researchers

by Pablo de Castro

This post is a summary of my experience last Friday at the European Researchers’ Night event in Padova. It was an interesting experience and gave me some insights regarding public outreach in these type of events which might be worth sharing and discussing here.

The Physics of Vector Boson Pairs

by Tommaso Dorigo

At 10:00 AM this morning, my smartphone alerted me that in two months I will have to deliver a thorough review on the physics of boson pairs – a 50 page thing which does not yet even exist in the world of ideas. So I have better start planning carefully my time in the next 60 days, to find at least two clean weeks where I may cram in the required concentration. That will be the hard part!

Because of that, rather than an article about things that I know about boson pairs, this is a post about things I do not know well enough now, but on which my knowledge will see a rapid expansion in the near future. Don’t get me wrong: I know the matter, from the history of research in this interesting sub-field

Practical Tools of the Improvised Speaker

by Tommaso Dorigo

Yesterday I visited the Liceo “Benedetti” of Venice, where 40 students are preparing their artwork for a project of communicating science with art that will culminate in an exhibit at the Palazzo del Casinò of the Lido of Venice, during the

AMVA4NewPhysics Deliverable 4.1: Report of the Performance of Algorithms for Data-Driven Background Shape Modeling

by AMVA4NewPhysics press office

And here it is, the second – but really synchronous in publication with the first – scientific deliverable of our network. Deliverable 4.1, titled “Report of the Performance of Algorithms for Data-Driven Background Shape Modeling“, is a report of studies performed by network members operating within Work Package 4, also known as “New Statistical Learning Tools for HEP Analysis“.

The research presented in this document aims at constructing a precise representation of background processes to searches for small signals in hadron collider data. Specifically, we focused on the multijet QCD background,