Not the God Particle: The Higgs Boson

In 2012, the Higgs boson was discovered at the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva, Switzerland. Dr. Heather Gray will explain what this Higgs boson is and why it is so important that we had to spend 10 billion dollars to build an enormous collider (and detectors) to find it. She will introduce the complex experiments that we use to study this particle and explain how we actually go about measuring its properties. She will also review what we currently know and don’t know about this particle, while focussing on some of its weird features. We’ll conclude with a short discussion about what the Higgs boson might tell us about the future of the universe.

Some questions to be answered:
How do we do experiments to study such a tiny particle with such a fleeting existence?
Why is the Higgs boson such an important particle ?
What do we know about the Higgs boson so far?
What does the Higgs boson tell us about the future of the Universe?

Speaker: Heather Gray, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory