Professor Robin Erbacher received her Ph.D. from Stanford University in 1998. She is now leading a team of researchers who are analyzing the top quark-- the heaviest and least understood of all quarks-- for the CDF experiment at Fermilab's Tevatron collider, currently the world's highest energy particle accelerator. The Tevatron will soon be surpassed in energy by the upcoming Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Geneva, Switzerland, where Professor Erbacher is also a member of the CMS experiment. With this new machine, particle physicists are anxiously anticipating many new discoveries in the coming decades.
Description of the talk
Particle physics began at the turn of the last century with the discovery of the electron, and was revolutionized in 1968 with the discovery of quarks, the fundamental building blocks of matter. Now, forty years after finding first evidence for quarks, we are only just beginning to understand the heaviest of these: the top quark, and its role in the origin of Electroweak Symmetry Breaking-- the mechanism leading to the concept of matter having mass. With experiments at Fermilab's Tevatron collider, and soon at the Large Hadron Collider in Europe, we are certain to learn much more about the top quark, and to discover what lies beyond the Standard Model of quarks and electrons.
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Time and Place
The lecture was held on Tuesday Jan. 29, 2008 at 7:30 pm in the ARC Ballroom at UC Davis.
This lecture was sponsored by the High Energy Frontier Theory Initiative and the UC Davis Physics Department. Call 530-752-4086 for more information.
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