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. I will explain what this Higgs boson is and why it is so important. I 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. The course is intended for anyone interested in physics, but not planning to major in it. In particular, no background in either mathematics or physics will be assumed. This seminar is part of the Food for Thought Seminar Series.

Physics 24 Section 001 has some seats reserved for L&S First-Year Pathways students; any remaining seats will be released before the adjustment period begins.

Requisites

• Students with 1-2 Terms in Attendance

Repeat Rules