The Large Hadron Collider: Exploring Nature at its most fundamental level

The Large Hadron Collider near Geneva in Switzerland is the largest scientific experiment ever built. More than 10000 scientists from over 150 countries participate in this enterprise. It seeks to shed light on important scientific questions such as the origin of mass and the Nature of Dark Matter. The LHC started operating in earnest on March 30th this year after a design and construction phase of more than 20 years. I will discuss the scientific motivation of the experiment and show its current status.

Beate Heinemann is a professor in the Physics Department of UC Berkeley and a researcher in the Physics Division of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. She grew up in Germany and after obtaining a PhD at the University of Hamburg in Germany moved to Liverpool in the UK where she did research at the Tevatron collider near Chicago in the US. In 2007 she joined the Berkeley faculty and started working on the LHC on the ATLAS experiment. Throughout her career she has focused on the exploration of the smallest particles in the Universe, and in particular on the search for new (as yet unknown) particles.