Where art thou, O Higgs?

February 16, 3:30pm - 4:30pm
Mānoa Campus, Wat. 112

The Department of Physics and Astronomy Colloquium: Prof. Steve Nahn, MIT Dept. of Physics, to speak on "Where art thou, O Higgs?"

Abstract:
The world's most powerful particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), has just finished its second year of proton proton collisions at center-of-mass energy of 7 TeV, increasing the data sample by a factor of ~125. So, the world is waiting (and starting to get impatient) for the answer to one of the flagship questions addressed by the LHC: what is the mechanism by which fundamental fermions and bosons are endowed with mass? There is a simple hypothesis, embodied by the so called "Higgs Mechanism" embedded into the Standard Model of particle physics, which requires one new particle, giving experimenters at the LHC a quest: The hunt for the Higgs. This talk will elaborate on why this is an interesting question for the LHC, demonstrate a bit of what it takes in terms of experimentation to answer the question, and discuss the current state of the hunt.


Ticket Information
Free

Event Sponsor
Physics and Astronomy, Mānoa Campus

More Information
Dr. Peter Gorham, 956-9157, gorham@phys.hawaii.edu

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