The Higgs and beyond: dawn of a new era of particle physics
Abstract:
The largest machine ever built, the Large Hadron Collider was constructed to discover the last and central piece of the Standard Model: The Higgs particle. On the 4th of July 2012, almost 40 years after the theoretical prediction of the Higgs boson, the ATLAS and CMS collaborations proclaimed victory in this tremendous effort, resulting in a Nobel Prize for Sir Peter Higgs and François Englert. Meanwhile, the LHC has produced truly remarkable and surprising results with the potential to open the door to a new era of particle physics.
In this lecture, we will take you on a journey from the theoretical motivation for the Higgs (so strong, that we build a $10 billion dollar machine to find it!) and the gigantic experimental effort it took to discover it. Beyond that, we will review anomalies and excesses recently measured at the LHC which could be pointing towards New Physics, explain the experimental part of the results and put them into the big picture from a theory point of view, in particular what they imply for a future fundamental theory of nature.
This lecture course is particularly aimed at non-particle physicists who take interest in the recent exciting results from the LHC.