On October 6, 2012 Bing Zhou, (Professor and Associate Chair of Physics at the University of Michigan) gave the talk "The New Particle Discovery at LHC with the ATLAS Experiment." This was the first Saturday Morning Physics talk for Fall 2012. Saturday Morning Physics is hosted by the University of Michigan Physics Department.
After decades of searching, evidence for the existence of the Higgs boson was finally found at CERN. This is a tremendous step forward in Physics made possible through the efforts of the LHC experiments (ATLAS and CMS). These experiments were a international collaboration involving many institutions including the University of Michigan. Professor Zhou presented a brief history on the Higgs hunting in the past decades. She reported the experimental evidence of the new particle discovery and ongoing research related to the studies of the new particle with the ATLAS experiment.
What is the Higgs boson? In the 60's a group of physicists independently proposed the following idea: add a new field permeating space that gives particles mass, and a new particle (or a group of related particles) that creates this field. These are usually called the Higgs field and the Higgs boson(s) respectively, after Peter Higgs. Peter Higgs is one of the physicists who originally proposed the mechanism and is currently professor emeritus at the University of Edinburgh. Professor Higgs is shown in the slide above.
Bing Zhou answering questions from the audience.
Saturday Morning Physics Website.
Photo Album, Lowbrows at Saturday Morning Physics.
(Photos from John Causland).
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