"Particle Physics since 1945 and the Emergence of the Standard Model"

The St Cross Centre for the History and Philosophy of Physics will be holding a lecture by Professor Sir Jim Virdee FRS (Imperial College London) entitled "Particle Physics since 1945 and the Emergence of the Standard Model" on Thursday 20th October 2016 at 5 pm.

The discovery in July 2012 of the Higgs boson at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) constitutes one of the most important scientific discoveries of this new century and completes the particle content of the Standard Model of Particle Physics. The Standard Model (SM) is one of the most significant achievements of physics in the past 50 years. Its descriptive and predictive power has been experimentally verified with unprecedented accuracy over many generations of experiments ranging from low to high energies. So far no significant deviations from its predictions have been observed.

This talk will give a historical perspective of particle physics from the mid-1940s and the theoretical and experimental work that followed leading to the creation of the SM. The talk will discuss the Large Hadron Collider, its experiments and the search for the Higgs boson, postulated in the 1960s for imparting mass to fundamental particles. Alongside determining the exact nature of the found Higgs boson, searches are being made for physics beyond the SM in order to illuminate the road ahead to the cherished goal of a unified theory of all physical phenomena in Nature. The outlook will be briefly discussed.