On 4 July 2012, two international experiments announced simultaneously the discovery of the particle known as the Higgs Boson – the culmination of a project that began 20 years earlier. Half a million people around the world watched the presentation streamed live. Why was it so important? Are there other particles, similarly important, waiting to be discovered?

University of Canterbury visiting Erskine Fellow, Physics Professor Sally Seidel, who works at the Large Hadron Collider, will discuss particle discovery in her upcoming UC Connect public lecture on Thursday 26 July.

“Discovering new particles involves teams of thousands of people, from dozens of nations, working together to build experimental facilities so large that, if they weren’t buried deep underground, they would be visible from space,” she says.

“The detectors typically have tens of millions of components specially designed and built for this purpose alone. Why is all of this worthwhile? This talk will explain how each new particle has the potential to unlock the answer to a fundamental question about the nature of the universe.”

Elementary Particle Physics, also called High Energy Physics, is the study of the very smallest building-blocks of nature.

“This is a way to learn what the universe was like just seconds after it was born, billions of years before life existed to see it directly.”

Sally Seidel is a Professor of Physics at the University of New Mexico and a member of the ATLAS Collaboration. Her primary research involves searching for new physics processes with heavy quark signatures. Her team also develops new technologies for particle tracking detectors. In 2014 her group discovered a new particle, the Bc(2S).

UC Connect public lecture - Discovering New Particles, Physics Professor Sally Seidel, University of New Mexico, United States, 7pm on Thursday 26 July at the C Block lecture theatre, Ilam campus, University of Canterbury.

Register to attend free at: www.canterbury.ac.nz/ucconnect