The Hunt for the Higgs

Location

Mother Rosalie Hill Hall, Warren Auditorium

Free

In a tunnel 100 meters below the Franco-Swiss countryside, the world’s most powerful particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider roared into action in 2010. Since then this collider has provided more than a thousand trillion high energy proton-on-proton collisions facilitating the most sensitive probes of the subatomic universe.

After a brief description of the Large Hadron Collider and the CMS and ATLAS detectors at CERN, Vivek Sharma will focus on the hunt for the elusive Higgs Boson, the quantum particle associated with an all-pervading Higgs !eld hypothesized to explain the origin of mass in our universe. The recent discovery of a new Higgs-like particle with a mass of about 125 Billion electron volts will
be described.