Category Archives: Higgs Boson

Introduction to the Large Hadron Collider at CERN

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at the CERN laboratory in Geneva is well described in detail on their website cern.ch as well as in YouTube videos.  I am just giving a brief introduction here for an OLLI class. The LHC collides … Continue reading

Posted in Cosmology, Higgs Boson | Leave a comment

Introduction to Quarks, Leptons, and The Electromagnetic and Weak Interactions

The ordinary matter of the universe is composed of protons, neutrons, and their combinations in nuclei, as well as their surrounding electrons making up atoms.  The connection with quarks is that the proton contains two u quarks and one d … Continue reading

Posted in Higgs Boson | Leave a comment

Evidence for the Higgs at 125 GeV in the LHC (11/27/2012)

This is just a simplified version for an OLLI class, not a comprehensive treatment.  The figures are from the excellent particle physics blog resonaances.blogspot.com of 14 November, 2012.  They are from the ATLAS and CMS presentations at the Hadron Collider Physics conference … Continue reading

Posted in Higgs Boson | Leave a comment

Higgs Production and Decay Channels

First of all, the protons circulating in the LHC have to be considered as a bag of quark and gluon components.  Each proton has two valence up quarks and one valence down quark.  At a high fraction of the proton’s … Continue reading

Posted in Higgs Boson | Leave a comment

Introduction to the ATLAS Detector at the LHC

The ATLAS detector site www.atlas.ch provides a comprehensive presentation of the detector and its physics.  This is just a brief presentation for my OLLI classes. I don’t mean to slight the other general detector at CERN which is CMS, but I … Continue reading

Posted in Cosmology, Higgs Boson | Leave a comment

What Might the Higgs Boson Imply? (Supersymmetry)

The Higgs Boson discovery must still meet several tests to verify that it is the standard model Higgs.  It’s coupling in various production channels of particles must show that its couplings are exactly proportional to the masses of the particles … Continue reading

Posted in Cosmology, Higgs Boson | Leave a comment

Importance of The Higgs Boson Discovery

This is a part of a short talk that I am giving to the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at UC Irvine on the LHC update. The discovery of the Higgs Boson, postulated by Peter Higgs and others in 1964, is … Continue reading

Posted in Cosmology, Higgs Boson | Leave a comment

Some References for Cosmology: Books and Web Talks

Having viewed a number of Alex Filippenko’s cosmology talks at UC Irvine OLLI at the end of his Teaching Company lectures, I wanted to list some general public books and web lectures on the topic. Books:  (Even though I’m referencing Kindle, … Continue reading

Posted in Cosmology, Higgs Boson | Leave a comment

Outline for OLLI Talk on the LHC Update

I have about a half hour to give a talk on the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, to the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute (OLLI) associated with UC Irvine.  I am just going to list here an outline of topics … Continue reading

Posted in Higgs Boson | Leave a comment

My Talks on Richard Feynman and Murray Gell-Mann to OLLI

I gave talks on “The Physicists Richard Feynman and Murray Gell-Mann” to the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at UC Irvine.  I tried to explain their physics contributions in simple terms and pictures, and show their genius in finding the simple and intuitive … Continue reading

Posted in Higgs Boson, Osher Lifelong Learning Institutes, Particle Physics | Tagged , | Leave a comment