To register for your free place at this talk please email Katie Weeks (k.weeks@imperial.ac.uk).
Particle physics is the study of the fundamental building blocks of nature and the forces that hold them together. Our understanding is ‘encoded’ in the Standard Model, which has been amazingly successful at explaining the experimental data taken over the last 30 years.
Within this model the well-known but elusive Higgs boson is responsible for mass generation. However, until the announcement of the results from CERN last year, there was no experimental evidence to support this.
Despite its success, the Standard Model cannot be the final answer as it does not address issues such as why over 80% of the matter in the universe isn’t visible. It must be part of a larger, unified theory such as supersymmetry, which offers an explanation for dark matter.
Biography
Gavin Davies performed his undergraduate and postgraduate studies at Imperial. After postdoctoral fellowships in the UK, Italy and Switzerland he returned to Imperial as a Lecturer in 2000, with promotions to Reader in 2004 and Professor in 2010. His research interests relate to searching for new particles, in particular Higgs bosons and dark matter.
Gavin’s early research was in detecting dark matter and included developing new, more powerful techniques now widely used around the world. His subsequent research has focused on the Higgs boson with experiments at CERN in Switzerland and Fermilab in the US, including the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) and DZero.
Since returning to CMS in 2010 his research has focused on analysing results from various decay modes, as part of the observation of a new boson in July 2012 with mass around 125GeV.