Elliot Lipeles
Award citation:
For his contributions to the discovery of the Higgs
From the BNL Newsroom
On Tuesday, July 16, physicist Elliot Lipeles of the University of Pennsylvania will present the 2013 Sambamurti Memorial Lecture, titled “The Higgs Discovery: How It Happened and What It Means.” The talk will be held in the Physics Department’s large seminar room in Bldg. 510 at 3:30 p.m.
Just more than one year ago—on July 4, 2012, to be exact—physicists collaborating on experiments at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN in Europe announced that they discovered a new particle. Scientists use the LHC to collide protons and lead ions at nearly the speed of light and record-breaking energy levels to attain new insights into the origin of mass, the nature of dark matter, and other fundamental mysteries of the universe.
At the time of the big announcement last summer, physicists said the new particle resembled the Higgs boson—the last remaining piece of the Standard Model, a menu of fundamental particles that make up the universe and how they interact. With additional data collected and analyzed from collisions at the LHC, physicists have since deduced that this new particle is a Higgs boson, inspiring more excitement in the quest to advance our understanding of the most basic building blocks of all matter.
During this Sambamurti Memorial Lecture, Lipeles will explain why physicists were looking for the Higgs boson, why they needed high-energy particle collisions to see one, and how they knew they did, in fact, see a new particle in the results from these high-energy particle collisions. Lipeles will also discuss the next steps for further probing this new particle at the LHC.
Lipeles earned a Ph.D. in physics from the California Institute of Technology in 2003. He was a postdoc at the University of California, San Diego, from 2003 until 2008, when he became an assistant professor at the University of Pennsylvania and a collaborating member of ATLAS, one of four major experiments at the LHC. Brookhaven Lab is the headquarters for the 45 U.S. institutions in the 176-member ATLAS collaboration.
