## Some posts you might have missed in 2008 – part II January 6, 2009

Posted by dorigo in physics, science.
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Here is the second part of the list of useful physics posts I published on this site in 2008. As noted yesterday when I published the list for the first six months of 2008, this list does not include guest posts nor conference reports, which may be valuable but belong to a different place (and are linked from permanent pages above). In reverse chronological order:

December 29: a report on the first measurement of exclusive production of charmonium states in hadron-hadron collisions, by CDF.

December 19: a detailed description of the effects of parton distribution functions on the production of Z bosons at the LHC, and how these effects determine the observed mass of the produced Z bosons. On the same topic, there is a maybe simpler post from November 25th.

December 8: description of a new technique to measure the top quark mass in dileptonic decays by CDF.

November 28: a report on the measurement of extremely rare decays of B hadrons, and their implications.

November 19, November 20, November 20 again , November 21, and November 21 again: a five-post saga on the disagreement between Lubos Motl and yours truly on a detail on the multi-muon analysis by CDF, which becomes a endless diatriba since Lubos won’t listen to my attempts at making his brain work, and insists on his mistake. This leads to a back-and-forth between our blogs and a surprising happy ending when Motl finally apologizes for his mistake. Stuff for expert lubologists, but I could not help adding the above links to this summary. Beware, most of the fun is in the comments threads!

November 8, November 8 again, and November 12: a three-part discussion of the details in the surprising new measurement of anomalous multi-muon production published by CDF (whose summary is here). Warning: I intend to continue this series as I find the time, to complete the detailed description of this potentially groundbreaking study.

October 24: the analysis by which D0 extracts evidence for diboson production using the dilepton plus dijet final state, a difficult, background-ridden signature. The same search, performed by CDF, is reported in detail in a post published on October 13.

September 23: a description of an automated global search for new physics in CDF data, and its intriguing results.

September 19: the discovery of the $\Omega_b$ baryon, an important find by the D0 experiment.

August 27: a report on the D0 measurement of the polarization of Upsilon mesons -states made up by a $b \bar b$ pair- and its relevance for our understanding of QCD.

August 21: a detailed discussion of the ingredients necessary to measure with the utmost precision the mass of the W boson at the Tevatron.

August 8: the new CDF measurement of the lifetime of the $\Lambda_b$ baryon, which had previously been in disagreement with theory.

August 7: a discussion of the new cross-section limits on Higgs boson production, and the first exclusion of the 170 GeV mass, by the two Tevatron experiments.

July 18: a search for narrow resonances decaying to muon pairs in CDF data excludes the tentative signal seen by CDF in Run I.

July 10: An important measurement by CDF on the correlated production of pairs of b-quark jets. This measurement is a cornerstone of the observation of anomalous multi-muon events that CDF published at the end of October 2008 (see above).

July 8: a report of a new technique to measure the top quark mass which is very important for the LHC, and the results obtained on CDF data. For a similar technique of relevance to LHC, also check this other CDF measurement.

1. Danny Ross Lunsford - January 7, 2009

Unfortunately I don’t find Motl’s behavior very funny. Perhaps you can afford to laugh, as you are gainfully employed in Europe and enjoy a rich and rewarding life doing what you set out to do. Things are not so rosy in the night-stricken USA, that nurtured this intellectual buffoon while her own citizens went begging.

-drl

2. dorigo - January 7, 2009

Well DRL, as they say “it takes all kinds to make a world” (or do they?).
I do not think Lubos stole anything in the US, and if he did, it is Harvard University’s responsibility.
In any case, I do not think that to laugh one needs to be on top. And this is the first time I hear somebody complaining about the US versus Italy. Believe me, my salary would be four times higher there. No kidding.
As for whether Lubos is funny or not, it is anybody’s call.

Cheers,
T.

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