If I told you I'd have to kill you

Being employed by a research institute (the French IN2P3, largely corresponding to the Italian INFN), contrary to university researchers or professors I do not have formal teaching duties. This leaves me plenty of time to devote to research (teaching can be very time-consuming, especially considering evaluations and exams that come with the job!), and that's a very good thing. On the other hand, it's not that I do not like teaching: I actually enjoy it quite a lot (and sometime I ask myself whether I should consider a change in my career path, but that's another story)!

If I do not have to teach, I can teach if I want to, and so I try to do it every once in a while. Since three years I'm a faculty member of the ESIPAP school, and lately I have been coopted to give a couple of lectures about LHC physics at the under-grad summer scho0l we host in Annecy since some time. Both experiences have been very rewarding, and I am currently pondering whether I should actively search for more teaching occasions.

Anyway, this year the students of the Annecy summer school were apparently so satisfied of the classes, that they decided to offer the faculties hand-made thank-you t-shirts. The one below it's mine, and it's a nice summary of what they retained of the lectures. There's the Mexican-hat Higgs potential, the appearance of an excess over a background spectrum as the possible signature of the presence of a new phenomenon, the fact that nobody should get excited about a 2-sigma fluctuations (I particularly appreciated the pun about wimps, it's all theirs). The school took place at the end of July just before ICHEP, so there were many results I could not show them yet, including the disappearance of the excess at 750 GeV, thus the "if I tell you I will have to kill you" sentence reminds something I probably said to answer a direct question. The fact that ATLAS seems to be better the CMS is definitively on them, I certainly did not encourage anything like that! As for the nice moustache, well, who knows?

(That's another experiment with blogging in English. Un esperimento, appunto, da mescolarsi con la consueta scrittura in lingua italica: lettori non anglofoni, non disperate!)