Particle Physics in a Season of Change

Friday, February 15, 2013
Ballroom A (Hynes Convention Center)
Chris Quigg , Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, Batavia, IL
Symmetry is beautiful, but departures from perfect symmetry make nature diverse and endlessly fascinating. Symmetry in nature's laws need not imply symmetry in the outcomes of those laws. Theoretical physicists are drawn to symmetries—which guide the construction of theories—but must understand how the symmetries are hidden in the world we experience.

The ATLAS and CMS Collaborations working at CERN's Large Hadron Collider have discovered a new particle that has much in common with the long-sought Higgs boson. I will summarize what is known—and what more
we hope to find out—about the new particle and its possible role in hiding the symmetry that links the weak and electromagnetic interactions. If the electroweak symmetry were not hidden, the character of the everyday world would be dramatically different: there would be no atoms, no chemistry, no solids or liquids, no life!

As the dialogue between experiment and theory brings us a new understanding of why the world is as we find it, new questions come into focus. I will choose a few of these based on what we have learned by AAAS 2012, and will try to look over the horizon at some unsolved problems.