Closing in on the Higgs BosonWhen: Tuesday, March 13, 2012 at 11:15 am
Where: DA 114
Speaker: Joseph Haley
Organization: Northeastern University
Sponsor: Physics Colloquium
The Higgs mechanism was proposed nearly fifty years ago as a way to explain how fundamental particles can have mass. In addition to explaining the origin of mass in the Standard Model of particle physics, the theory requires the existence of a yet undiscovered particle called the Higgs boson. After year of searching for this “last puzzle piece,” we are finally on the verge of either finding the Higgs boson or shattering the long standing Standard Model. The stage has been set by recent hints from the CMS and ATLAS experiments at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider of a Higgs boson with a mass around 125 times the proton mass. I will present brand new results from Fermilab’s Tevatron collider, which achieve similar and complementary sensitivity to a Higgs boson in this most interesting mass range.