Dr. Isabel Trigger, from TRIUMF (Canada’s national laboratory for particle and nuclear physics laboratory), will be presenting at Vancouver’s next Café Scientifique event on Tuesday, Sept. 25, 2012 at 7:30 pm in the Railway Club, 579 Dunsmuir St. (at Seymour St.) in downtown Vancouver.
From the Sept, 18, 2012 event announcement,
The title and abstract for her [Isabel Trigger] café is:
Higgs for the Masses : a peek under the hood of the universe
This summer experiments at the world’s largest particle accelerator at the CERN laboratory in Geneva announced discovery of a subatomic particle “consistent” with the one believed to give matter its mass. The Higgs Boson sparked extraordinary levels of public attention and media interest, in part due to the particle’s nickname (“god particle”), but also since its discovery is the result of a 40-year quest involving tens of thousands of scientists. But what, exactly, is a Higgs Boson? Why is it important? Who found it, and how? And what do we do with it now that we think we’ve found it? This talk will explore the Higgs Boson and what it means for our understanding of the universe at its most basic level.
I think it helps to know a little more about Trigger (from her biography page on the TRIUMF website),
Isabel Trigger graduated with a B.Sc. from McGill in 1994 and went on to complete an M.Sc. and a Ph.D. at the Université de Montréal between 1994 and 1999. Her M.Sc. thesis, “Evolution du spectre de dépôts énergétiques dans les détecteurs au silicium irradiés en protons,” studied the ultimate performance of silicon-based precise tracking detectors in the presence of radiation for the LHC. Her Ph.D., “Mesure des couplages trilinéaires anomaux des bosons de jauge avec le détecteur OPAL au LEP,” included definitive measurements of the self-coupling of standard model gauge bosons and is considered one of most challenging experimental analyses performed at the Large Electron Positron (LEP) Collider.
Dr. Trigger was awarded the competitive CERN Research Fellowship in 1999, leading to the exceptionally rare offer of a CERN research staff position in 2001. She personally performed the most general and comprehensive search for the “chargino” particles predicted by supersymmetric theories.
Isabel was also a leader in the CERN [European Particle Physics Laboratory] team designing and testing the alignment system that monitors the relative positions of the 22 m diameter ATLAS endcap muon chambers with 50 μm [micrometre] accuracy. In 2005, TRIUMF recruited Dr. Trigger to lead the establishment of an ATLAS physics analysis group. She is currently the ATLAS-Canada physics coordinator.
From what I understand they are now declaring the Higgs boson exists when I last reported (my July 4, 2012 posting) on this topic, scientists at CERN were pretty sure it existed. I’m sure Trigger will have the latest information.
On a completely other note, I think café is a bit of a misnomer for the Vancouver events held at the Railway Club, since this is a beer drinking establishment. So, be prepared to drink beer in a back room on Tuesday night (Sept. 25) while you listen to talk about the underpinnings of the universe.