KITP Public Lecture Wednesday, May 13, 8:00 pm

Tuesday, April 14, 2009

Professor Maria Spiropulu presents “The Universe in Collisions”

[Flyer] [Public lecture page]

The LHC (Large Hadron Collider) is the proton-proton supercollider built in a 27 km tunnel underneath the Franco-Swiss border near Geneva that had first beams circulating on Sept 10 2008. The LHC and its two-general purpose experiments ("ATLAS" and "CMS") present us with unprecedented challenges in terms of complexity and size in the field of high-energy physics. This lecture will cover the technology and physics of the most violent events ever to be observed in the laboratory, the challenges of extracting new physics from a billion collisions per second, and the path from detection to discoveries that will address the most puzzling questions on the composition and dynamics of the Universe.