A note on comments and spam February 1, 2007
Posted by dorigo in internet, language, personal.2 comments
If you submitted a comment and did not see it in the blog, it is because akismet has become more aggressive in tagging suspicious comments.
In case you still have the text, please send it to me and I will post it. My address is dorigo(at) pd (dot) infn (dot) it .
Bumps part III - how significant is that peak? February 1, 2007
Posted by dorigo in personal, physics, politics, science.5 comments
In the previous part of this story we left Paolo Giromini busy with the examination of the dimuon mass spectrum obtained from Run I data of the CDF experiment: 100/pb of proton-antiproton collisions, which contained a large signal of vector meson resonances - about 200,000 J/psi and psi(2S) decays, and more than 10,000 Upsilon(1S) decays.
Giromini (pictured on the left upon entering his office, slightly perplexed to see me and Maria Spiropulu with our feet on top of his keyboard, sitting in his chairs and smoking his cigarettes) was looking for the decay of a bound state of two scalar quarks, in a p-wave configuration - basically, the two quarks would orbit each other with one unit of angular momentum. The mass of such a particle -let’s call it E, for Epsilon - would have to be roughly twice as large as that of the scalar quark of which he was seeing some weird evidence in other datasets - twice 3.5-4 GeV, that is, or 7-8 GeV. What was he to expect about the number of decays of such a particle in his dataset ? (more…)
