Gail Hanson

Transcription

The Higgs Boson is the one missing link that we had in what we call the standard model which explains everything we know so far about fundamental particles and fundamental interactions with these particles And for forty years we've been looking for the one missing link because the Higgs Boson is needed to explain why particles have mass and without that the theory doesn't work. So it's a wonderful thing, it's a big accomplishment for many many people that we finally found it. If you've been hunting for something for forty years, wouldn't you be excited? It's a hunt. It's a search. It's something that has a very important impact, but it's also just the hunt. Trying to find this. For so many years we've been searching for it, and many people have spent their lives working on it, and that we've finally found it is a wonderful victory. Well, if it's the Higgs Boson, then that means that we understand the model that we thought we understood that explains interactions of particles. If it turns out to be not the Higgs Boson, well there are a couple of cases, I guess. One is that it's a Higgs Boson, but a Higgs Boson within a more complicated version of what you could call a standard model. For example, there could be more than one Higgs Boson. That would be very important if that turns out to be the case. And in some of these theories the lightest of the Higgs Boson looks very much like the standard model Higgs Boson. So we have to do some clever work to find out if the kinds of things that that model predicts, and the standard model by itself does not predict, could be the case. So this will be a big hunt by itself. But at least now we have something to play with. I think that this is a very good use of money because this is understanding something very fundamental about the way our universe works. Without this, we simply cannot understand. And if we want to understand, isn't that a good use of the money? This is something that a civilized world should be doing. Not only searching for things like the Higgs Boson, but other sorts of basic research and other cultural aspects of music and art are also important. That's one of the things we do. That's what makes us civilized. There's another aspect to this which is this search for the Higgs Boson has brought together physicists from all over the world. Many countries working together on this search, on this physics. And, to me, that in itself is a very worthwhile thing. We can say that we all shared in this, and there are not too many things that you can mention that are like that. You know, this is not like one country against another country. It's everyone working together for some common goal. That's kind of a big victory for mankind, isn't it? UC Riverside was one of the founding members of CMS. I actually wasn't here then. I was working on something else called the superconducting supercollider at the time, but UC Riverside was involved in the original design of CMS, and they worked on a design of the muon detector. Then when I came here, I've been here for twelve years, I worked on the Silicon Tracker which is the-- if you think of the muon detector as outer tracker, you can think of the silicon tracker as the inner tracker. So that in the end you can connect tracks. That's where you see where the charged particles go from the inner part to the outer part. So we're all working together. There are other parts of the detector, there's another group here that works on the hadron calorimeter. This is something that measures the energies of particles in between the silicon tracker and the muon tracker. Not all particles make it out to the muon tracker. But you can measure some of their energies in this thing called the hadron calorimeter including some neutral particles that you don't see in the central tracker, because they have to be charged. You have people working on the Higgs and also on, I think I mentioned, supersymmetry. This is the theory in which there could be more than one Higgs We have people who are working on that search I myself working on the Higgs and supersymmetry, because, okay, the Higgs is standard model, but maybe there's something more, so supersymmetry is interesting as well. And we have people who are also studying the heaviest fork, the top fork. Being a scientist, what we'd like to do is move on to the next questions. So studying this Higgs that now we have-- sort of we've captured it, right? We can study it to death. We can find out whether it is really what we thought it was, or whether there's something more subtle and there's something more. And in addition of course we'll do the others physics that we're doing as well. So, you know, here we've capture it. It's like we've captured some, I don't know, wild animal we've been looking for for so long. And we could study it, so that'll be fun.