A Quantum Diaries Survivor

If you just visited this blog (that is as I post this message, between 11.40 and 11.50PM on May 1st), you have a 10% chance of having generated its 500,000th view. Sorry, no red carpet, band with trumpets, or prize.

I believe about a third of the visitors are colleagues with some degree of parenthood -meaning they work in the same field I do, or similar ones. The rest are a 50-50 mix of non-physicists who are just interested in science, and occasional visitors who are not likely to hang around.

While I do enjoy the increased interaction I obtained in these years with fellow physicists, particularly theorists and people from whom I have a chance of learning something new, the class of readers that are dearest to me are the non-physicists who try to understand physics. It is to them that this blog is mostly aimed at.
Of course, I not always manage to write something that is both at the right level and interesting enough for them, but I do try to.

In any case, I thank all of you who visit this blog occasionally or regularly for giving me the encouragement and the stimulus to make this site worth the time I spend making it better and keeping it -hopefully- interesting and informative. I also use this occasion to encourage any of you who has something potentially worth a post, to submit it to me. You can get a feeling of what guest posts here may be by looking at the “guest post” page up here.

This blog has been on air for more than two years, and it is time (one reason will be clear in the next post) to have a look at some of the information wordpress offers to its members concerning incoming traffic. I am not so interested in the volume of visitors as much as in what they are looking for when they come by, and I have thus always found very useful the yardstick provided by the “Search engine terms”: what people typed in the google search box to be directed to my site.

Let us first of all look at the all-time data, before attempting to provide warnings for caveats and the like.

1. “tommaso dorigo”, 5857 searches
2. “placenta”, 2089 searches
3. “azores”, 1907 searches
4. “quantum diaries”,  1672 searches
5. “bubble chamber”, 1563 searches
6. “steven hawking”, 1408 searches
7. “funny road signs”, 1314 searches
8. “lisa randall”, 1062 searches
9. “bed”, 959 searches
10. “quantum diaries survivor”, 949 searches
11. “dorigo blog”, 880 searches
12. “vegetable porn”,  743 searches
13. “barmaid”,  739 searches
14. “funny street signs”,  578 searches

and then we later also find

21. “how to do a tracheotomy”, 434 searches

23. “particle collision”, 412 searches

30. “pegah emambakhsh”, 315 searches

36. “fellatios”, 235 searches

43. “top mass”, 195 searches

44. “michel platini”, 195 searches

and

50. “tomasso dorigo”, 175 searches.

Now, let me try to make a few points about the naked and outrageous data I displayed above.

First of all, by reading the above list one might be tempted to believe that the blog is not about physics. Wrong. The conclusion is based on a biased trial function, if you pass me the french. People in the web search for a lot of different things, and only a tiny minority looks for physics: so, as embarassing as it is, I get more people looking for fellatios than for top mass measurements.

Another thing to note is the fact that by posting pictures a blog does increase its traffic. This is a slightly concealed datum in the list above, but it becomes clear if you find out that people looking for “placenta” were drawn to my site because I did post a picture of one -and I think there are not so many pictures of such a peculiar mass of flesh and blood. The same thing is clear if one notices “bed” and “azores”, which both are due to my posting pictures of those things in the past.

Other miscellaneous hints:

• I am not the only one in the world who misspells Stephen Hawking’s first name.
• Same goes with tracheostomy
• And tragically, the number of people who misspell my own first name are about 3% of the total. Not a negligible signal.

Overall, it is a bit depressing to see the naked truth that many of your visitors came by by accident, and will never show up again -if not for another accident. But this is the internet. A community where people do what they like, and sometimes -rarely, but it does happen- try to learn something.

During the last ten years I have graduated 11 undergraduate students in Physics, plus tutored four PhD students through to their title. Despite this variety of personalities that have crossed my path in forming their credentials as physicists, there is one single example of “my student” which stands above all, for continuity and results, and that example is Giorgio Cortiana.

Giorgio joined our group in 2000 as a summer student at Fermilab, and he worked during the months of August and September with me at the design of a trigger we were putting together to collect Higgs bosons in the forthcoming Run II. Following the positive experience, he asked our group for a thesis in CDF, and worked with me at the same topic, a multijet trigger for Higgs events.

He graduated with the highest score, and entered Padova’s PhD program at the end of 2002. CDF data was just starting to pour in in reasonable amounts, and Giorgio’s PhD time span was well-placed to allow us to invent something new. We started working at a search for top pair decays including tau leptons and jets, a channel nobody had ever considered due to its apparent trouble -a huge background from QCD events. We, however, were soon convinced our search could yield a pleasant surprise.

And indeed we struck gold when, in early 2004, we found out that by extending the search to an inclusive signature of missing transverse energy and jets -which allowed to include events where one of the top quarks decayed to an electron or a muon which failed the tight lepton identification criteria- we soon obtained a large signal of events that other searches had totally ignored.

With the data we had selected, Giorgio and I obtained CDF’s third-best measurement of the top pair production cross-section, and we soon published a paper on Physics Review Letters. In the meantime, Giorgio also obtained his PhD, which was soon followed by a research grant to continue working with our group in Padova. The plan of the grant was to measure the top quark mass with the decays he had collected in the inclusive missing Et plus jets search: he did it very effectively, and he published another nice paper in record time. While he was doing that, he also had his hands full in a new re-design of the CDF calorimeter trigger, again focused on a more efficient collection of Higgs events. He took an important role in the project as responsible for the monitoring of the trigger, and his group completed the task in due time: CDF now has a much more effective identification of jets at trigger level 2, and this means a sizable increase in Higgs sensitivity.

Despite these successes, we had to witness once again how Italy is not generous with young researchers. Bright, young and able, with the highest academic title in his pocket Giorgio -as hundreds like him- is deprived of job security, and has to accept a salary which in other countries would be refused by a graduate student. So he recently started looking for a better position outside Italy, and he of course found one very soon. He gave a farewell seminar in Padova last week (if I have a chance I will describe his interesting talk here), and he is now off to Munich, where he is joining the ATLAS group. ALAS, I would say, since I at least hoped he would end up in a CMS group instead: that would have allowed me to continue collaborating with him…

The best of luck to Giorgio then. I am sure he will be appreciated in his new group. In the meantime, I have to reckon with a thinning group of collaborators: Julien left three months ago… To ATLAS too!