The Higgs Boson for the Masses?
The Higgs boson has been the object of one of the greatest campaigns in the history of particle physics and a pop-culture icon. But what is a Higgs boson, and what would we like it to do for us? What will we understand after the discovery that we did not understand before? How would the world be different if nothing did the job of the Higgs boson? We will explore these questions and more, tracing the development of the electroweak theory from notions of symmetry, hidden symmetry, and gauge invariance through the discoveries of superconductivity and parity violation to the "standard model."
Chris Quigg is a Senior Scientist and theoretical physicist at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory. He graduated from Yale University in 1966 and received his Ph.D. in 1970 under the tutelage of J. D. Jackson at the University of California, Berkeley.
Quigg's research spans many topics in particle physics, from hadron structure through ultrahigh-energy neutrino interactions. His work on electroweak symmetry breaking and supercollider physics has been recognized by the 2011 J. J. Sakurai Prize of the American Physical Society for outstanding achievement in particle theory (shared with his collaborators: Estia Eichten, Ian Hinchliffe, and Kenneth Lane).
His current research focuses on experiments at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. A new edition of his textbook, Gauge Theories of the Strong, Weak, and Electromagnetic Interactions, is in the works from Princeton University Press