Yesterday, we heard from Lyn Evans, “Evans the Atom”, who designed and built the Large Hadron Collider, and is now working on the next generation of atom smashers.
Today, meet Sheldon Stone, who’s recreating the Big Bang at the LHC beauty experiment to find out what was there in the earliest moments of the universe.
But the LHC isn’t the only big particle physics lab.
You can also meet Jenni Adams and her colleagues from IceCube.
IceCube is the world’s largest telescope, looking for neutrinos spewed out from exploding stars. But it’s buried 2km under the South Pole, and at its core is a cubic kilometre of ice.
Also to come this week at the high energy physics conference:
- the strange world of subatomic particles – quarks and squarks, neutrinos, zinos, winos and all the other inos;
- and on a more serious note – leaders from CERN, Fermilab, KEK (Japan) and IHEP (China) will tell us what’s next, and what they’ll focus on after the Higgs.
We’ll be holding morning and afternoon press briefings at 8am and 6pm in plenary 3 at the Melbourne Convention Centre, and webcast via http://press.highenergyphysicsmedia.com/
Tuesday 10 July – a telescope buried under the Antarctic ice
A supernova shoots out billions of neutrinos, which have no mass and pass straight through Earth as if it wasn’t there. Jenni Adams is a Kiwi scientist who’s trying to detect neutrinos as the pass through the Earth. She’s lucky to catch a dozen of them.
She’s using a neutrino telescope buried a couple of kilometres under the South Pole. It’s one of a pair – the other is under the Mediterranean Sea off the coast of France.
They’re looking for black holes at the centre of galaxies, tracing the origin of cosmic rays and helping in the search for dark matter.
And hear about charming and beautiful world of subatomic particles: where charm quarks and charm antiquarks come together in charmonium; where neutrinos hang with zinos, winos and all the other -inos.
At Tuesday’s briefings, meet:
- Sheldon Stone – who’s recreating the Big Bang at the LHC in the beauty experiment
- Jenni Adams – a Kiwi scientist spotting neutrinos with IceCube, an underground Antarctic telescope
- Pat Scott and Matthais Danninger – two young guys working with Jenni at IceCube
- Lance Dixon – who’s searching for ‘new physics’ and understanding what happens when atoms smash together
Wednesday 11 July – what’s next? Physics in Japan, China and around the world
Delegates at this conference were witness to a huge announcement, a game-changer in the field of particle physics.
What can we expect at Valencia in Spain in 2014 when high energy physicists reconvene for the 37th International Conference on High Energy Physics?
What will the next atom-smashers look like and where will they be?
What will we look for after the Higgs boson?
Wednesday’s briefing will be a speculative chat with leaders from:
- CERN, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research
- Fermilab, the leading American particle physics lab
- KEK, the Japanese accelerator research organization
- IHEP, the Institute for High Energy Physics in Beijing
- And, here in Melbourne, the ARC Centre of Excellence for Particle Physics
Conversation with Fabiola Gianotti – Tuesday 10 July, 8pm
Meet the leader of the ATLAS collaboration, one of the two teams who worked on the search for the Higgs boson at the Large Hadron Collider.
Fabiola Gianotti is the spokeswoman and coordinator of the world’s largest scientific experiment. She was elected by her scientific colleagues to represent them as they revealed the results of their $10 billion search for the Higgs.
Prof Gianotti will be at Melbourne University today, Tuesday 10 July.
In her lecture she will discuss the challenges and goals of the Large Hadron Collider, the ATLAS experiment and its latest results, and the impact of particle physics on society.
The Basement Theatre, The Spot Building (Business & Economics)
198 Berkeley Street, Carlton
Press briefing details and background information
All our press briefings are in Plenary 3, at the Melbourne Convention Centre, South Wharf. We are also hosting a media room upstairs for accredited media.
For those of us without a higher degree in theoretical physics, we’ve got a crack team of friendly physicists to answer your questions and help you understand the science.
On the conference media website, http://press.highenergyphysicsmedia.com, we have: photos and videos of the Higgs announcement: abstracts and program timetables; background information; and copies of any press releases and briefing materials we put out.
These press briefings and all of this week’s plenary sessions will be live-streamed at the conference press website if you can’t make it to the Melbourne Convention Centre. There’s no need to register for that – it will be freely available via the conference media website.