Tag: Special Feature
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Exploring the Higgs: A Personal Retrospective
Exploring the Higgs: A Personal Retrospective When I started my career as a theoretical physicist in the early 1980’s, the Higgs boson was not yet a topic of major theoretical interest. There was a long gap between the time when the Brout- Englert-Higgs mechanism was proposed and when people really started doing some hard calculations.
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The long hunt for the Higgs boson
The long hunt for the Higgs boson An essay about the Higgs boson ten years after its discovery? Already ten years? This unique adventure has left indelible memories to the thousands of people who have been instrumental in giving birth to this wonderful discovery. There have been also Higgs-boson adventures at LEP and at the
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From Despair to Discovery
From Despair to Discovery The Ultimate Higgs Discovery Machine: The excitement amongst particle physicists around the world was palpable when the LHC, a proton accelerator twenty years in the making, started its commissioning phase on 10th September 2008. With 7 TeV protons beams designed to collide with unprecedented intensity, the LHC could produce the long
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Solving New Puzzles with the Higgs Boson
Solving New Puzzles with the Higgs Boson … to make an end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from. T.S. Eliot, Little Gidding You might think that particle physics has accomplished its goals with the discovery of the last piece of the Standard Model jigsaw puzzle, the Higgs boson, but
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ATLAS and CMS experiments looking forward to Run 3
ATLAS and CMS experiments looking forward to Run 3 On the 4th of July of 2022 we celebrated the 10th anniversary of the end of decades-long search for an experimental confirmation of the BEH mechanism, and the start of a new era. With the discovery of the Higgs boson, the last unknown fundamental parameter of
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Deciphering the Electro-Weak Phase Transition at Current and Future Colliders
Deciphering the Electro-Weak Phase Transition at Current and Future Colliders Over the past century, a whole zoo of particles has been discovered and their interactions have been investigated. This led to a puzzling mystery; on the one hand we discovered a property of Nature, known as electro-weak symmetry, which gave a unified explanation of radioactive
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Intelligent Design for Particle Detectors
Intelligent Design for Particle Detectors Particle detectors are becoming ubiquitous: originally designed as tools for fundamental physics (collider physics experiments, neutrino observatories, etc.), they are also increasingly used in medical and industrial applications. For all use cases, the main challenge in the design of a detector can always be described by the same terms: achieving
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LLP11: The eleventh workshop of the Long-Lived Particle Community
LLP11: The eleventh workshop of the Long-Lived Particle Community Amidst the excitement of preparations for the impending Run 3 of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), as well as prominent developments of key projects around the globe, the eleventh workshop of the Long-Lived Particle (LLP) Community initiative (LLP11) was held virtually from 30 May to 3
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New precise measurements of CP violation and mixing in beauty and charm decays at LHCb
New precise measurements of CP violation and mixing in beauty and charm decays at LHCb In 1928, a young Paul Dirac wrote one of the most spectacular papers of modern physics when he successfully unified two distinct theories, quantum mechanics and special relativity. What arose from his equations was a prediction of a new form
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Non-resonant searches open new avenues in the hunt for axion-like particles
Non-resonant searches open new avenues in the hunt for axion-like particles Axion-like-particles (ALPs) are a vast family of hypothetical particles. They are among the most compelling candidates for physics beyond the Standard Model (SM), because their existence is associated to broken symmetries, which are ubiquitous in theories addressing any of the big open questions, from