Peter Higgs' 90th Birthday Celebration

Friday 20 Sept 2019, 13:30 → 19:00 UTC

Playfair Library

We will celebrate Peter Higgs' 90th birthday with an afternoon of talks looking back to the journey to the discovery of the Higgs boson and looking forward to future discoveries in particle physics. 

The talks will be given by:

• Lyn Evans (CERN)
• Chiara Mariotti (Torino)
• Christoph Englert (Glasgow)

This will be followed by a drinks reception. 

The event will take place in the Playfair Library, University of Edinburgh on Fri 20th September, 2019, beginning at 1.30.

13:30 → 13:40 Welcome

Speakers: James Dunlop, Peter Mathieson

13:40 → 14:10 Peter Higgs, Mathematical Physics and all that...

Speaker: Richard Kenway (The University of Edinburgh)

14:10 → 15:10 The history of 50 years of the Standard Model from the point of view of a machine builder

I started building particle accelerators in 1969, the year that the first ground-breaking results on deep inelastic scattering were coming out of SLAC. Since then, I have worked on all the great machines that were needed to crack the Standard Model, including the CERN PS, the SPS proton-antiproton collider, the Tevatron, LEP and of course the Large Hadron Collider. I will describe the innovative technologies needed each step of the way, culminating in the discovery of the higgs boson in 2012.

Speaker: Lyn Evans (CERN)

15:10 → 15:45 Coffee Break

15:45 → 16:45 The story of a discovery - how we found the long-sought-after Higgs boson

The search at LEP and at the LHC, and finally the discovery of the Higgs boson at LHC will be discussed. The measurements and the future prospects will be presented. The scientific part will be enriched with some anecdotes.

Speaker: Chiara Mariotti (Torino)

16:45 → 17:45 Higgs Phenomenology: Opportunities for New Physics

With the Higgs boson’s discovery in 2012, the last missing piece of the Standard Model was found. All pieces of the puzzle seem to fit nicely with our theoretical paradigm (the so-called Standard Model of Particle Physics) that has withstood experimental scrutiny over the past decades. But something is rotten in the state of Particle Physics. The Standard Model while in astounding agreement with measurements so far, falls short on very fundamental questions such as the apparent presence of dark matter or the overabundance of matter compared to anti-matter in the Universe. In parallel, there are rather too many theoretical warning signs for comfort with the Standard Model. In this talk, I will show how Higgs physics provides a historic and unique opportunity to revolutionise our microscopic understanding of nature in ways comparable to the introduction of Quantum Mechanics of the early 20th century while delivering solutions to the open questions of Particle Physics.

Speaker: Christoph Englert (Glasgow)

18:00 → 19:00 Drinks Reception