The two times I thought I discovered new physics but it was an error

An account of the two times I thought I have discovered new physics, but it was a mistake!

Has Particle Physics Been Hijacked by ET?

After the two sophons arrive on Earth, their first mission is to locate the high-energy particle accelerators used by humans for physics research and hide within them. At the level of science development on Earth, the basic method for exploring the deep structure of matter is to use accelerated high-energy particles to collide with target …

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 …

Prof. Higgs, Pay me my money down!

I waited few days before writing anything about the Nobel Prize for Physics 2013. As most people know at this point, this year the prize was awarded to François Englert and Peter Higgs "for the theoretical discovery of a mechanism that contributes to our understanding of the origin of mass of subatomic particles, and which recently …

What is mass: Q&A

Q: It takes trillions of collisions to produce a few Higgs bosons, and they decay very quickly. However, if this boson is supposed to give things their mass, shouldn't there be an abundant supply of Higgs bosons around us? This seems contradictory to me. In other words, if they are not around us constantly, what …

Live Blogging: #Higgs Boson

One day before: Update from CDF/D0 Tevatron's experiments CDF and D0 just published their most up-to-date searches for the Standard Model Higgs boson. You can read the preprint here [arXiv:1207.0449] and take a closer look at the bonanza of new plots here.What they see is a mild excess especially in the h->bb decay channel, for which …

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 …

Accumulating evidence for nonstandard leptonic decays of Ds mesons

from arXiv:0803.0512v2 [hep-ph] The measured rate for D_s -> l nu decays, where l is a muon or tau, is larger than the standard model prediction, which relies on lattice QCD, at the 3.8 sigma level. We discuss how robust the theoretical prediction is, and we show that the discrepancy with experiment may be explained …

Supersymmetry for the masses

Introduction Since the times of the Ancient Greece, Natural Philosophers (they had several names, from time to time) have often asked themselves what the "world" is really made of. The first answer was "atoms" ("impossible to divide further"), and, as today, we still can't prove if it's true or not. Nowadays, this word has the …