Back to the Big Bang: the Large Hadron Collider

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) has been described as the worlds largest scientific experiment, and physicists and engineers from all over the world have invested years of effort in designing and constructing it. Yet, despite its size, the LHC has been built to study the very smallest components of the universe. Although we know a lot about these fundamental building blocks of nature from previous experiments, weve realised that we need to discover and understand far more. Tara Shears will describe some of the outstanding mysteries and open questions in particle physics, which the LHC has been designed to help investigate. Three of the most pressing questions being the question of mass and our search for the Higgs boson the problem of antimatter the search for dark matter. The hope is that data from the LHC will shed light on at least some of these mysteries, and Tara will show how the plan to analyse this data and understand more of the universe. She will describe the experiments, which detect the outcome of the beam collisions, and also the intention to manipulate and make sense of the huge volumes of data that will be recorded. Lyn Evans will describe some of the technical innovation and challenges in the LHC design and construction.

Tara began her scientific career in 1991 by taking a PhD in particle physics with the University of Cambridge, where she analysed data from the OPAL experiment at CERN and measured the lifetime of one particular fundamental particle - the bottom quark. After her PhD she remained on the OPAL experiment, first with a PPARC postdoctoral fellowship and then a CERN fellowship, investigating the production of W bosons. Lyn Evans is recognised world-wide as an outstanding expert in particle accelerators. The citation for his election as a Fellow of the American Physical Society, for example, was for contributions to the physics of particle accelerators and storage rings, in particular to the development of the understanding of the fundamental limitations of high-energy hadron colliding beam devices.