Incandela discusses Large Hadron Collider program

Joe Incandela, the announcer of the Higgs Boson discovery and a particle physicist, spoke about the goals of the Large Hadron Collider program and its progress over the past four years in a lecture on Thursday night. He highlighted significant discoveries and their implications for our understanding of the universe.

Incandela is a professor of physics at University of California, Santa Barbara and serves as spokesperson for the Compact Muon Solenoid experiment at the LHC, one of the groups that discovered the particle known as the Higgs Boson. Following several years of data collection by the CMS and A Toroidal LHC Apparatus experiments at the LHC, which sought to find the theoretical particle, the discovery of the Higgs Boson was made public on July 4, 2012.

Particle physics is a field that “[looks] for the underlying code of our universe,” Incandela said. He explained that the current picture of the universe is based on the Standard Model, which describes the fundamental particles in our universe including quarks, leptons and the forces between these particles.

Particle accelerators aim to probe the fabric of space-time in order to study the particles that do not exist in the usual sense but are instrumental in determining the structure and evolution of our universe, Incandela explained.

“Imagine an invisible fabric that cloaks all the particles that can exist and encodes how they can interact,” Incandela said. “If we concentrate enough energy in one small region, we can pull particles out of this fabric and make them real.”

Incandela noted the large scale of the experiments and collaborations at the LHC, the largest particle accelerator built to date. The CMS, the experiment which Incandela currently heads, involves a collaboration of 4,300 scientists from 41 countries.

Incandela also described the “major discovery” of the Higgs Boson particle. In both the ATLAS and CMS, which sought to find the theoretical particle, experiments saw a “bump” in the mass distribution at 125 GeV, the mass that was predicted by physicists to be indicative of the particle.

The confirmation of the discovery in March 2013 followed several months of very extensive analysis of data.

Incandela discussed the implications of the Higgs Boson discovery for scientists’ understanding of the universe. Based on the masses of the top quark and the Higgs particle, physicists have concluded that the universe lies in a meta-stable region, giving the universe a finite lifetime of around 10^12 years, explained Incandela.

According to the Standard Model, the particles that carry forces should be mass-less, but experimental data contradicted this theory, so scientists theorized the existence of the Higgs Boson particle to fill in the gaps in their observations. The discovery of the particle implies the presence of the Higgs field, which explains why some of these particles have mass, although the interactions previously predicted by the Standard Model required them to be mass-less.

Incandela’s lecture, the 38th annual Donald Hamilton Lecture funded by the physics department, took place in McDonnell Hall.