Visit to CERN

I am just back from CERN, where I stayed over this week to visit Diego Blas at the CERN THeory Division and to give the talk "Compact Objects as Dark-Matter Probes".

Some sparse thoughts on the visit:

1) On the first night, I checked in at a hotel in Geneva instead of staying at the CERN hostel. That was a very bad move. Everything in Geneva is unbelievable expensive and the hotel (albeit 3 star and averaged rated) turned out to be quite bad. I got bed bugs, i am still full of pinches, and i'm still trying to disinfect my clothes at home...

2) On the other hand, the hostel at CERN (where I stayed for the rest of the week) was excellent. The room was clean and cozy and equipped with a large desk. Everything at CERN seems to be designed to simply researchers' life and work.

3) I was impressed by the low average age of people working at CERN. About 10K work at the center and most of them are young PhDs or postdocs. The comparison with the average Italian university, where most of the faculty members and staff are over 40, is impressive. I recently read an interview by CERN Director Fabiola Gianotti, who was precisely commenting on this fact. However, experiencing it directly is a different kettle of fish.

4) Although CERN is big and experiments are scattered around a 27-km underground ring, I enjoyed the fact that most offices are located in a handful of buildings which are connected among each other. This basically means that theorists can chat over a coffee with experimentalists, or that it is easy to attend the (enormous) number of talks and lectures that are organized on a daily basis. The canteen is also common for all buildings and researchers from different collaborations and experiments meet there to have lunch (and sometimes dinner) together.

5) Overall, the atmosphere is definitely suggestive, even for someone like me who's used to see so many physicists in the same place (I guess that for the numerous students who regularly visit CERN during a school trip it must be really a unique experience).

6) I had the opportunity to meet various friends with whom I went to college in Cagliari (some of them are also authors of this blog). Funny enough, the excess of physicists from Cagliari University, especially in the LHCb experiment, is beyond 5 sigma. Thus, I had the opportunity to visit the LHCb experiment and control room, as this picture testifies:

Visit to the LHCb experiment. 
From the left to the right: Andrea (aka Scrilly), Francesco (both CERN Fellows) and me.

7) BTW, I also had the opportunity to hear more rumors around the 750 GeV diphoton resonance. Every theorist I talked to was extremely excited and sometimes confident about the possibility that ATLAS and CMS experiments have detected something new. Funny enough, every experimentalist I talked to was instead extremely cautious and, most of the time, pessimistic. I should definitely write about this in a next post but, as you probably have heard, this coming week the spotlight will all be on LIGO's announcement of the first direct detection of gravitational waves (!) No doubts on the topic of my next post (after Thursday).

Recommended by us: "The EMC effect still puzzles after 30 years"

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Thirty years ago, high-energy muons at CERN revealed the first hints of an effect that puzzles experimentalists and theorists alike to this day.

Contrary to the stereotype, advances in science are not typically about shouting "Eureka!". Instead, they are about results that make a researcher say, "That’s strange". This is what happened 30 years ago when the European Muon collaboration (EMC) at CERN looked at the ratio of their data on per-nucleon deep-inelastic muon scattering off iron and compared it with that of the much smaller nucleus of deuterium.

Fig. 1.

The data were plotted as a function of Bjorken-x, which in deep-inelastic scattering is interpreted as the fraction of the nucleon’s momentum carried by the struck quark. The binding energies of nucleons in the nucleus are several orders of magnitude smaller than the momentum transfers of deep-inelastic scattering, so, naively, such a ratio should be unity except for small corrections for the Fermi motion of nucleons in the nucleus. What the EMC experiment discovered was an unexpected downwards slope to the ratio (figure 1) – as revealed in CERN Courier in November 1982 and then published in a refereed journal the following March (Aubertet al. 1983).

Continue to read on Cern Courier

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Recommended by us: CERN and Sterile Neutrinos

CERN Set to Study Sterile Neutrinos

by Edwin Cartlidge on 5 February 2013

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A new experimental facility to detect a hypothetical particle that many physicists think probably doesn't exist could be up and running at the CERN laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland, within 3 years, assuming that the lab's member states approve spending roughly $110 million to build it.

The sterile neutrino, if it exists, would be an obscure variety of an already otherworldly subatomic particle. Ordinary neutrinos, which have no charge and almost no mass, come in three varieties: electron, muon, and tau. They are very hard to detect because their interaction with ordinary matter is extremely feeble, but over the years physicists have detected enough of them to observe that as they travel through space they can "oscillate" from one flavour to another.

This oscillation phenomenon, which means that neutrinos cannot be entirely massless, has been confirmed by many different experiments. But one such experiment produced results at odds with the rest. That was the Liquid Scintillator Neutrino Detector (LSND) at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, which in data acquired between 1993 and 1998 showed muon antineutrinos to be oscillating into electron antineutrinos far more readily than expected.

(Continue to read on news.sciencemag.org)

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Festival della Scienza a Cagliari (V edizione)

Dal 6 all’11 novembre ritorna, per il quinto anno consecutivo all’Exmà, il Cagliari FestivalScienza. 

La manifestazione è promossa e organizzata da Scienza Società Scienza, comitato presieduto da Carla Romagnino e nato dalla

passione di alcuni docenti con l’obiettivo di mettere assieme risorse umane e finanziarie per organizzare manifestazioni periodiche dedicate alla scienza e con il fine di creare, in Sardegna, un Centro della Scienza di respiro europeo.

Oltre ottanta gli appuntamenti in programma, fra conferenze, incontri, laboratori interattivi e mostre per sei giorni di appuntamenti con la fisica, la chimica, le scienze naturali, la matematica, con una ricca varietà di linguaggi e attività per coinvolgere grandi e piccini, scuole e famiglie, ricercatori e semplici cittadini.

Zombies at CERN!

The Halloween night is just round the corner and I could not keep myself from showing you a film trailer dealing with a very well themed topic: ZOMBIES!

Well, you might think I’m going mad: it might even be Halloween but what the point of talking about zombies in The Gravity Room?

Zombie al LHC

Visto che tra poche ore sta per arrivare la notte di Halloween non potevo sottrarmi dal mostrarvi il trailer di questo questo film che tratta di un argomento perfettamente in tema con la giornata: gli ZOMBIE!!!!

Bene voi ora direte che sto "uscendo di matto" perché se è vero che vi è un attinenza tra il giorno della pubblicazione e l'argomento del film non si capisce il perché questo post debba essere pubblicato su "The Gravity Room".

Angry Birds to teach particle physics

From http://www.symmetrymagazine.org 

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The vengeful Angry Birds cardinal sets his sights on a new target: teaching kids particle physics.

By Signe Brewster

CERN and Angry Birds-creator Rovio announced last Friday that they will team up to produce a learning program for children between 3 and 8 years old. The partnership will focus on the Angry Birds Playground brand, which is designed to make learning about physics fun and accessible for all ages. It is based on Finland’s national kindergarten curriculum.

“It’s not so much to teach kids in a serious way, but to bring them into science in a playful and inspiring way,” says Rolf Landua, head of CERN’s education and outreach group. “Rovio has quite a comprehensive educational program, which is available on the Internet. To hook onto that and provide content that gives young children an idea of what CERN is doing and what modern physics is about with the help of the little angry birds, I think that’s quite promising.”

The birds in the Angry Birds game are angry because pigs stole their eggs. Landua says that in the Playground game, children will walk around an island and search for traces of the eggs. As they do so, they will be asked to solve puzzles, some of which will relate to CERN research.

The announcement took place at the annual Frankfurt Book Fair, which is the largest publishing fair in the world. CERN Director General Rolf-Dieter Heuer and Rovio Chief Marketing Officer Peter Vesterbacka shook hands to seal the agreement."We are also discussing further collaboration with Rovio, perhaps on physics games for older children, or the development of a new game around the Angry Birds in the CERN universe,” Landua says. Rovio released Angry Birds in 2009, after which it quickly became a hit on the iPhone and other devices. The company has since adapted the characters for use in other products, such as playgrounds and the new educational system. 
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The Physics of Angry Birds.

               

Clima, attività solare e raggi cosmici...

Visto che siamo in tema di "effetti dell'attività solare" e benché sia più difficile immaginare che il Sole con la sua attività  possa influenzare il tasso di decadimento delle sostanze radioattive piuttosto che il clima, una prova scientifica di quest'ultimo effetto mancava all'appello. La causa di ciò è da imputare soprattutto alle difficoltà di recuperare dei dati storici affidabili sul clima. Tuttavia uno studio pubblicato su "Geophysical research letters" ha messo in relazione la bassa attività solare al verificarsi di inverni particolarmente rigidi nell'Europa centrale fin dal 1780. Come hanno fatto i ricercatori ad ottenere dei dati così precisi sul clima? L'idea è davvero molto astuta, e per chi vuole saperne di più consiglio la lettura dell'articolo su LeScienze.