The Berkeley Seminar Program has been designed to provide new students with the opportunity to explore an intellectual topic with a faculty member in a small-seminar setting. Berkeley Seminars are offered in all campus departments, and topics vary from department to department and semester to semester.

The discovery of a new particle, the Higgs boson, by the ATLAS and CMS experiments at the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva, Switzerland in 2012 was the culmination of 60 years of research and experimentation since its prediction. It is also the final piece of the puzzle, the last particle, in the Standard Model of particle physics. This seminar will provide an introduction to particle physics and the Standard Model. We will discuss what this Higgs boson is and why it is so important. We will also discuss the enormous accelerators and detectors used to discover the Higgs and conclude with a discussion about what the Higgs boson can tell us about the future of particle physics. Heather attended the University of Cape Town in South Africa from 1999-2005 where she obtained a BSc, BSc(Hons) and then a MSc in Physics. She then attended the California Institute of Technology and obtained her PhD in Physics in 2011. She then worked at CERN as a Research Fellow and Research Staff Scientist from 2012-2017 before moving to LBNL as a Divisional Fellow in 2017. Heather joined the UC Berkeley faculty in 2019. She received the IUPAP C11 Young Scientist Prize in 2018 and a Sloan Fellowship in 2020. Faculty web site: https://physics.berkeley.edu/people/faculty/heather-gray

Requisites

• Students with 1-2 Terms in Attendance

Repeat Rules