Particle Physics
From Strings To Stars
Introduction
 What is Particle Physics?
 Large Hadron Collider (LHC)
 Current Experiments
 The Future..?
– ALICE
– ATLAS
What is Particle Physics?
 Why does the sun shine?
 Why is the sky blue?
 Discovering the nature of the Universe!
What is Particle Physics?
 The Universe – Boils down to just a
few fundamental particles and forces
which come together in various
combinations
 The Standard Model!
The Standard Model
 What
Top Leptons
Six
Bosons
Includes
Higgs
Quarks
Quark
we
Boson..?
–the
and
‘Force
–in–photon;
Weird!
the
three
Includes
Carriers’
rest
generations
175
Carrier
ofneutrinos
the
timeUniverse
ofmass
theand
EM
of are
the
force
made
proton!of
electron
Grand Unified Theory (GUT)
 Superstring Theory seems to be a good
 Trying to unify the fundamental forces
 candidate
However, there’s more than one GUT
 Still
Electric,
Electromagnetic,
Electroweak,
Closed
need
only
flexing
Magnetic,
atotheory…
deal
Strong
loops
with
Strong,
Strong,
gravity;
Weak
Weak
maybe at
40GeV
10
of space-time!
What are we doing right now?
 Large Hadron Collider (LHC)
– Slams stuff together!
– ALICE
– Quarks and Gluons
– ATLAS
– The search for the Higgs Boson
On With The Show!