PI Public Lecture Series:
Presented by
Title: The Most Wanted Particle
Abstract: In what promises to be a smashing public lecture, Jon Butterworth will give a personal account of what it is like to work on the largest experiment ever built, the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. He will recount the excitement and tension surrounding the quest, under unprecedented media and public attention, to find the famous Higgs boson. Butterworth, a physics professor at University College London (UCL), will explain the motivation and importance of the Higgs search, discuss his specific research at CERN’s ATLAS detector, and speculate on the exciting breakthroughs that still await in the world of high-energy physics.
Biography: Jon Butterworth grew up in Manchester, UK, and took his Bachelor of Physics and his doctorate in Oxford. He worked for Penn State University on the HERA electron-proton collider in Hamburg, before moving to UCL in 1995, later becoming one of the leading members of the ATLAS collaboration at the CERN Large Hadron Collider. He won the UK Institute of Physics Chadwick Medal in 2013 for his contributions to particle physics. He is Head of the Department of Physics & Astronomy at UCL, and writes for the Guardian at http://www.theguardian.com/science/life-and-physics. His book, "Most wanted particle" was published in Canada in January 2015.