A few thoughts about the 750 GeV diphoton bump

The big news in particle physics during the winter 2015-2016 is certainly the excess found by the ATLAS and CMS Collaborations in the invariant mass of two high-energetic photons in the data acquired in 2015 at a centre-of-mass energy of 13 TeV. If you don't know what I'm talking about, then it's time to catch …

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The Hunt for the Higgs Boson

Forewords The hunt officially started on Oct 19th, 1964 when Peter Higgs published a paper called "Broken symmetries and the masses of gauge bosons" on Physical Review Letters (Vol 13, No. 16). Nowadays, his brilliant explanation about the origin of the mass of elementary particles is being tested in two laboratories: at Fermilab, 80 miles …

ATLAS: Last detector connected

The LUCID detector, which will measure the luminosity of the collisions occurring in the centre of ATLAS, was among the last pieces of the detector to get approval. In fact, the small collaboration, based in Bologna, Italy; Alberta, Canada; Lund, Sweden; and at CERN, didn’t even begin building until February of last year. LUCID is …

ATLAS helps shed light on the retina

Technology developed for high-energy physics has led to the discovery of a retinal cell that eluded biologists for 40 years.  The 512 electrode array, inspired by silicon microstrip detector technology in ATLAS, records the electrical activity of retinal neurones. ATLAS expertise have crossed over to biology enabling the discovery of a retinal cell type that …