When your non-physicists friends start to send emails with links to headlines of big newspapers (usually titled ‘Einstein was wrong’: that’s apparently the best the average reporter can come up with) it means something potentially interesting is happening. In fact, after days of rumors, the results of the Opera experiment have been announced

http://arxiv.org/abs/1109.4897

And they are frankly bizarre. Ready? Neutrinos (in this specific case those fired from CERN to the Gran Sasso laboratories) seem to travel faster than the speed of light, therefore violating one of the pillars of modern physics. Now, the members of the Opera collaboration themselves are very cautious. Before throwing away our theories, let’s see if other experiments are able to reproduce this result.

When your non-physicists friends start to send you links to big newspapers’ headlines reporting important physics results (usually titled ‘Einstein was wrong’: it’s been like that for almost a century now, it is apparently the best an average reporter can come up with) it means that something potentially important is happening. After days of rumors, the results of the Opera experiment have been finally released

http://arxiv.org/abs/1109.4897

and they are frankly bizarre. Ready? Neutrinos go faster than the speed of light! My first reaction is ‘this is too odd to be true’, and in fact the members of the Opera themselves are very cautious.Let’s wait and see whether other experiments confirm or disprove these findings.

GRAPPA (Gravitation and AstroParticle Physics Amsterdam) is the name of the new center of excellence of the University of Amsterdam. In an unprecedented effort, the University hired 4 new professors in 2011 (Shin’Ichiro Ando, Patrick Decowski, Ben Freivogel and myself) and two additional positions will be opened at the end of the year. There will be a kick-off meeting this Fall, stay tuned! 

Identifying Dark Matter is a top priority in Particle Physics and Cosmology: we know it contributes 85% of all the matter in the Universe, and we know that it cannot be made of ordinary baryonic matter. What is it then? Among Dark Matter candidates, WIMPs (weakly interacting massive particles) occupy a special place, since they naturally arise from well motivated extensions of the standard model of particle physics, therefore providing an elegant explanation to the Dark Matter problem. With the advent of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, and of a new generation of astroparticle experiments, the moment of truth has come for WIMPs, for we will either discover them in the next 5 to 10 years, or we will inevitably witness the decline of the WIMP paradigm.