The first ATLAS Inner Detector End-cap after complete insertion within the Liquid Argon Cryostat. (Photo: CERN)
Why I care about the Higgs boson. To coincide with Sussex hosting the Institute of Physics' J oint HEPP and APP conference, 21-23 March 2016, experimental physicist Professor Antonella de Santo , who leads the Sussex team involved with the ATLAS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider, reveals what drives new discoveries. Throughout my career I have been very fortunate to witness several great discoveries - neutrino oscillations in the late nineties, while I was a PhD student, and then a young postdoc working on neutrino physics; and then, after about a decade working on the ATLAS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider, the discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012 . In my heart I always knew I wanted to become a scientist . When I was at school I did rather well in all subjects, but I took particular pride in distinguishing myself in science and maths. As a student, I used to find particle physics so deeply elegant and satisfying, addressing, as it does, physics phenomena at their most fundamental level. I decided to become an experimentalist rather than a theoretician because I wanted to get as close as I could to data, always in the hope that I would witness the unraveling of new physics phenomena first-hand.
TO READ THIS ARTICLE, CREATE YOUR ACCOUNT
And extend your reading, free of charge and with no commitment.
