Physics Colloquium, Vivek Sharma, UCSD. Refreshments at 3:30pm.

Abstract: In a tunnel 100 meters below the Franco-Swiss countryside, the world’s most powerful particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider, has roared into action. In 2011, this collider provided more than 400 trillion proton-on-proton collisions at a center-of-mass energy of seven trillion electron-volts.

After a brief description of the LHC collider and the CMS and ATLAS detectors at CERN, I will focus on the hunt for the elusive Higgs Boson, the quantum particle associated with an all-pervading Higgs field hypothesized to explain the origin of mass in our universe.