March 12, 2003
Wednesday - 4:00 pm in Swain West 119
Speaker: Pauline Gagnon, Indiana University
Title: Another day, another boson: work at a Higgs factory

Abstract:
From 1989 to 2000, four large detectors were in operation Around the Large Electron-Positron (LEP) particle accelerator at the European Laboratory for Particle Physics (CERN) located near Geneva, Switzerland. More than 2000 physicists from all over the world, including several from Indiana University, participated in these large experiments. I will show the most recent results on the search for the elusive Higgs boson, a particle theoretically predicted but which has escaped detection so far. This particle is needed to explain how matter can acquire mass when all particles are created massless in our standard description of elementary particles. I will show how we have looked for this particle so far at LEP and how we intend to pursue these searches with a new accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider, and new detectors, ATLAS and CMS, all currently under construction at CERN.