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higgs boson

Science at Cal - Beate Heinemann - The Quest for the Higgs Boson at Large Hadron Collider

9mo ago
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The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) was built in the past decade near Geneva at the border of Switzerland and France, and is now operating since last year at the world's highest energy. A primary objective of the LHC is to either discover or dispute the so-called Higgs boson. The Higgs boson was first hypothesized nearly 50 years ago in 1964 in order to find a mechanism by which all particles that make up the matter in our Universe acquire mass. Just in the last year the LHC has made significant progress in its search for the Higgs boson. Particularly at the end of 2011 initial search results were observed that show tantalizing hints that a discovery might be very near which received a broad echo within the scientific community and the popular press. In my lecture will describe the LHC and its experiments, the relevance of the Higgs boson and the current state of the experimental searches. Beate Heinemann received her Diploma and PhD from the University of Hamburg in Germany, working on the HERA electron-proton collider. From 2006-2006 she was a fellow at the University of Liverpool in the United Kingdom, working with the Tevatron near Chicago. In 2006 she was appointed Associate Professor of Physics at the University of California, Berkeley. She works both on precision measurements of known processes, and on searches for new unknown particles, e.g. for the Higgs boson, supersymmetric particles and extra dimensions.