Hunting for the Higgs Boson

If you're in the East Bay tonight, you should check out the 2012 Segre Lecture at UC Berkeley. Peter Jenni, a CERN Scientist and former ATLAS Spokesperson, will present "Hunting for the Higgs Boson and more at the LHC." 

This annual lecture was conceived as a way for the Physics Department to honor and bring the work of an experimental physicist to the general public. Many renowned experimental physicists have been hosted. The observation of the Higgs Boson at the LHC was easily the biggest science story of the year, so this should be an excellent lecture. It will begin at 5PM in the Pauley Ballroom and is an lecture that any budding astronomer or science enthusiast won't want to miss! Click here to say you're going.

The lecture abstract is as follows:

For the past three years, experiments at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) have begun exploring physics at the high energy frontier. A rich harvest of initial physics results has been obtained that allows us to test the Standard Model (SM) of elementary particles and to make searches Beyond the SM (BSM), at the highest energy level ever reached in a laboratory. Most exciting is the recent discovery of a new particle that may well be the long-awaited Higgs Boson. This discovery would also establish the postulated electro-weak symmetry breaking mechanism in the SM. Other far-reaching results can be reported for BSM physics searches like Supersymmetry (SUSY) and its implication for Dark Matter in the Universe, Extra Dimensions, and the production of new heavy particles. Besides these physics results, the history and technical challenges of the LHC project, its status, future physics prospects, as well as Cal and LBNL’s prominent role in them will also be covered briefly in this talk.