Waiting for Higgs

October 3, 2013
3:00pm to 4:30pm

Blue Room

Specialist level
Speaker: 
Chris Llewellyn-Smith
Institution: 
Oxford U.
Location&Place: 

Blue Room

Abstract: 
The text book history of the discovery of a mechanism that can give mass to gauge bosons, which implies the existence of a Higgs boson or bosons, glosses over many convolutions. I will review what actually happened and why initially the work of Higgs and others did not excite much attention. I will then describe, from a personal perspective, how it became mainstream in the 1970s and 1980s before reviewing searches for Higgs bosons at LEP and then the LHC. Finally I will touch briefly on the discovery of a (probably ‘the’) Higgs boson at CERN, announced on 4 July 2012, and its implications.
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