Our esteemed expert Professor Sir Tejinder Virdee FRS covered 'What lies beyond the Higgs boson?' in this exclusive event for Members and their guests. Sir Tejinder Virdee is one of the founding fathers of the CMS experiment at the CERN Large Hadron Collider which in 2012 shared the credit for discovering the elusive Higgs boson. Recorded in February 2021.
Professor Sir Tejinder Singh Virdee FRS, Department of Physics, Imperial College London
At the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, Geneva they can probe our Universe moments after the Big Bang to tackle the questions about its origin, evolution and composition. These include: What is the origin of mass? What constitutes dark matter and dark energy? How many dimensions of space and time do we live in? Why is the universe composed of matter and not antimatter? The answers have the potential of altering our perception of how Nature operates at the fundamental level.
The discovery in July 2012 of the Higgs boson in the CMS and ATLAS experiments at the LHC, one of the most important of this new century, completes the particle content of the standard model of particle physics, a theory that describes our visible universe in exquisite detail. What lies beyond this discovery?
It is well-known that our current understanding of matter and forces is incomplete. Search is continuing for new fundamental physics that should illuminate the road ahead to the cherished goal of a unified theory of all physical phenomena in Nature. The talk will delve into what is planned, and hoped for, at CERN in the next few decades.
Sir Tejinder Virdee is a physicist who has led on the design, construction and operation of experiments to improve our understanding of particle physics. In 1990, he was one of the founding fathers of the CMS experiment at the CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC), which in 2012 shared the credit for discovering the elusive Higgs boson.
His role at CMS was key to developing new technologies within the detector to increase its reliability and accuracy, and he has in recent years acted as leader of the international collaboration, which includes nearly 4,000 researchers from 42 countries. He remains a strong advocate for the LHC and is recognised as a leader in the particle physics community.
Sir Tejinder Virdee has won numerous awards for his contributions to particle physics, including the High Energy and Particle Physics Prize of the European Physical Society. He was elected Fellow of the Royal Society and the U.K. Institute of Physics in 2012 and was knighted in the Queen's Birthday Honours in 2014 for services to science.