## Some posts you might have missed in 2008 January 5, 2009

Posted by dorigo in cosmology, personal, physics, science.
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To start 2009 with a tidy desk, I wish to put some order in the posts about particle physics I wrote in 2008. By collecting a few links here, I save from oblivion the most meaningful of them -or at least I make them just a bit more accessible. In due time, I will update the “physics made easy” page, but that is work for another free day.

The list below collects in reverse chronological order the posts from the first six months of 2008; tomorrow I will complete the list with the second half of the year. The list does not include guest posts nor conference reports, which may be valuable but belong to a different list (and are linked from permanent pages above).

June 17: A description of a general search performed by CDF for events featuring photons and missing transverse energy along with b-quark jets – a signature which may arise from new physics processes.

June 6: This post reports on the observation of the decay of J/Psi mesons to three photons, a rare and beautiful signature found by CLEO-c.

June 4 and June 5 offer a riddle from a simple measurement of the muon lifetime. Readers are given a description of the experimental apparatus, and they have to figure out what they should expect as the result of the experiment.

May 29: A detailed discussion of the search performed by CDF for a MSSM Higgs boson in the two-tau-lepton decay. Since this final state provided a 2.1-sigma excess in 2007, the topic deserved a careful look, which is provided in the post.

May 20: Commented slides of my talk at PPC 2008, on new results from the CDF experiment.

May 17: A description of the search for dimuon decays of the B mesons in CDF, which provides exclusion limits for a chunk of SUSY parameter space.

May 02 : A description of the search for Higgs bosons in the 4-jet final state, which is dear to me because I worked at that signature in the past.

Apr 29: This post describes the method I am working on to correct the measurement of charged track momenta by the CMS detector.

Apr 23, Apr 28, and May 6: This is a lengthy but simple, general discussion of dark matter searches with hadron colliders, based on a seminar I gave to undergraduate students in Padova. In three parts.

Apr 6 and Apr 11: a detailed two-part description of the detectors of electromagnetic and hadronic showers, and the related physics.

Apr 05: a general discussion of the detectors for LHC and the reasons they are built the way they are.

Mar 29: A discussion of the recent Tevatron results on Higgs boson searches, with some considerations on the chances for the consistence of a light Higgs boson with the available data.

Mar 25: A detailed discussion on the possibility that more than three families of elementary fermions exist, and a description of the latest search by CDF for a fourth-generation quark.

Mar 17: A discussion of the excess of events featuring leptons of the same electric charge, seen by CDF and evidenced by a global search for new physics. Can be read alone or in combination with the former post on the same subject.

Mar 10: This is a discussion of the many measurements obtained by CDF and D0 on the top-quark mass, and their combination, which involves a few subtleties.

Mar 5: This is a discussion of the CDMS dark matter search results, and the implications for Supersymmetry and its parameter space.

Feb 19: This is a divulgative description of the ways by which the proton structure can be studied in hadron collisions, studying the parton distribution functions and how these affect the scattering measurements in proton-antiproton collisions.

Feb 13: A discussion of luminosity, cross sections, and rate of collisions at the LHC, with some easy calculations of the rate of multiple hard interactions.

Jan 31: A summary of the enlightening review talk on the standard model that Guido Altarelli gave in Perugia at a meeting of the italian LHC community.

Jan 13: commented slides of the paper seminar gave by Julien Donini on the measurement of the b-jet energy scale and the $p \bar p \to Z X \to b \bar b X$ cross section, the latter measured for the first time ever at a hadron machine. This is the culmination of a twelve-year effort by me and my group.

Jan 4: An account of the CDF search for Randall-Sundrum gravitons in the $ZZ \to eeee$ final state.