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.

This seminar will be a conversation about experiment-driven, evidence-based science, using examples from the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) experiments. The LHC is the most powerful particle collider ever built, hosted by the European Organization of Nuclear Research in Geneva, Switzerland. Scientists use the LHC to study the most fundamental building blocks of the Universe and their interactions. In 2012, two experiments at the LHC, ATLAS and CMS, discovered the Higgs boson, which completed a highly successful theoretical framework known as the Standard Model of particle physics. However, big questions remain in the field of particle physics: why is gravity so much weaker than electroweak interactions? Why does our Universe have more matter than antimatter? What is the nature of Dark Matter? Are there extra spatial dimensions? This list can go on and on. Scientists are using LHC to look for answers to these questions. Each week, the instructor or a guest speaker will give a lightning talk on a topic related to the Large Hadron Collider experiment. Then students, instructors, and guest speakers engage in an open discussion, which could cover the research topic itself, the broader impacts of the research topic, and the interplay between the research work and the guest speaker or instructor's life and career paths. Toward the end of the semester, students will deliver their own lightning talk covering a topic related to the LHC experiments but of particular interest to themselves. A conversation between students and instructors will again follow the lightning talks. Haichen Wang received a B.S. in physics from Peking University in 2007, and a Ph.D. in physics from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2013. His Ph.D. thesis was about the discovery of the Higgs boson using data collected by the ATLAS experiment at CERN's Large Hadron Collider. He was an Owen Chamberlain fellow at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory from 2013 to 2018 before joining the Physics Department in January 2019. In 2021, he received a CAREER award from the National Science Foundation to develop novel machine learning applications for particle physics and construct detectors for the High Luminosity Large Hadron Collider.

Requisites

• Students with 1-2 Terms in Attendance

Repeat Rules