195681 event 1361963246 1475892166 <![CDATA[A Discovery! The Higgs? Why it is Important and How it Was Done.]]> SoP Frontiers in Science Public Lecture: Presenting Howard A. Gordon, Brookhaven National Laboratory

The ATLAS Experiment at the Large Hadron Collider with its sister experiment CMS reported a discovery last summer of a new boson which is consistent with the Standard Model Higgs boson.  The Higgs particle has been searched for decades. It is the final jewel in the Standard Model of particle physics, a crowning achievement of 20th century science that gives a powerful understanding of fundamental particles and their interactions. In the Standard Model, the Higgs is the quantum of a field that accounts for the masses of those particles.  We will describe the apparatus, the data and other searches. 

This is the second of two presentations Dr. Howard will deliver. The first will be at 3 PM in Room 1116, Klaus Advanced Computing Building.

]]> The Higgs particle is a central and highly intriguing element of our "Standard Model" of the subnuclear world, hypothesized primarily because it explains why certain observed particles -- the mediators of radioactivity -- have any mass. In addition to describing what the Higgs particle is and why it matters, the lecture will discuss last summer's reports from CERN's Large Hadron Collider, which announced results consistent with the Higgs particle.

]]> alison.morain@physics.gatech.edu

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