Please join us on Thursday, October 25, 2012 in Mendocino Hall 1015 at 4pm as we welcome Professor Maxwell Chertok from the physics department at University of California, Davis.  Dr. Chertok will present, "The Higgs Boson Discovery: Tiny and Enormous Science in Collision."

Professor Chertok joined the UC Davis faculty in 2000.  His research activities are in the field of high energy particle physics.  Chertok performs experiments at the Fermilab Tevatron and the CERN Large Hadron Collider, with the goal of uncovering the mechanism responsible for electroweak symmetry breaking and related phenomena.  Great discoveries require instrumentation, and Chertok has contributed to two critical detector systems in this pursuit:  the silicon vertex detector for the CDF experiment and the silicon pixel detector for CMS at CERN.  In 2008 while on sabbatical, Chertok led a team in the installatioin of this device at the very heart of the experiment.  Chertok uses electron, muon, and tau lepton signatures to search for new phenomena in the colliders' vast data samples. This research is motivated by Supersymmetric and Higgs models predicting spectacular signatures in these channels.  New results from the LHC indicate that a very fruitful era of understanding is here, and questions such as how particles acquire mass, why there is an electroweak scale, and what is the nature of dark matter will finally be addressed.

As always, this talk is FREE and OPEN TO THE PUBLIC.