Physics

Significance Of Counting Experiments With Background Uncertainty

In the course of Statistics for Data Analysis I give every spring to PhD students in Physics I spend some time discussing the apparently trivial problem of evaluating the significance of an excess of observed events N over expected background B.  This is a ...

Article - Tommaso Dorigo - Apr 6 2024 - 2:16am

Goodbye Peter Higgs, And Thanks For The Boson

Peter Higgs passed away yesterday, at the age of 94. The scottish physicist, a winner of the 2013 Nobel Prize in Physics together with Francois Englert, hypothesized in 1964 the existence of the most mysterious elementary particle we know of, the Higgs bos ...

Article - Tommaso Dorigo - Apr 9 2024 - 5:56pm

Shaping The Future Of AI For Fundamental Physics

From April 30 to May 3 more than 300 researchers in fundamental physics will gather in Amsterdam for the first edition of the EUCAIF conference, an initiative supported by the APPEC, NuPecc and ECFA consortia, which is meant to structure future European re ...

Article - Tommaso Dorigo - Apr 26 2024 - 3:42pm

Move Over- The Talk I Will Not Give

Last week I was in Amsterdam, where I attended the first  European AI for Fundamental Physics conference (EUCAIF). Unfortunately I could not properly follow the works there, as in the midst of it I got grounded by a very nasty bronchial bug. Then over the ...

Article - Tommaso Dorigo - May 6 2024 - 9:43am

A Cool Rare Decay

By and large, particle physicists confronted with the need to awe and enthuse an audience of laypersons will have no hesitation in choosing to speak about the Higgs boson and its mysteries- undoubtedly a fascinating story that requires one to start with th ...

Article - Tommaso Dorigo - May 26 2024 - 3:19am

A Workshop You Should Not Miss

... if you are a researcher in physics or astrophysics and you are working with machine learning, that is. Between September 23 and 25- just when summer is over- we will meet in Valencia, Spain, to discuss the latest developments in deep learning applicati ...

Article - Tommaso Dorigo - Jun 2 2024 - 10:23am

Acknowledging Giorgio's Mentoring Superpowers

Yesterday I gladly attended a symposium in honor of Giorgio Bellettini, who just turned 90. The italian physicist, who had a very big impact in particle physics in his long and illustrious career, is still very active-e.g. he makes all the hard questions a ...

Article - Tommaso Dorigo - Jun 5 2024 - 4:44am

Opposer At A PhD Defense

Yesterday I was in Oslo, where I was invited tro serve as the leading opposer in the Ph.D. defense of a student of Alex Read, who is a particle physicist and a member of the ATLAS collaboration. Although I have served in similar committees several times in ...

Article - Tommaso Dorigo - Jun 21 2024 - 11:47am

Your Portable Radiation Spectrometer- The Wondrous Radiacode 103

A few days ago I put my hands on a RadiaCode 103, a pocket radiation counter, dosimeter, and spectrometer that has recently appeared on the market. The company that produces it, RadiaCode, is located in Cyprus (see https://radiacode.com). The instrument is ...

Article - Tommaso Dorigo - Jul 4 2024 - 7:29am

Some Additional Tests Of The RadiaCode

In the previous post I have described some of the main functionalities of the RadiaCode 103 radiation spectrometer, which the company graciously made available for my tests. Here I want to discuss some additional tests I have done, using radioactive sample ...

Article - Tommaso Dorigo - Jul 11 2024 - 3:09am