Community science talk

With the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) — the world's newest, biggest and highest energy particle accelerator — successfully smashing 3.5 trillion-electron-volt (TeV) protons to smithereens in Switzerland, Brookhaven physicist Marc-André Pleier will discuss the international ATLAS collaboration's efforts to find the origin of mass and other new physics phenomena using the LHC's ATLAS particle detector.

During a free talk geared toward science-interested adults and young people, Dr. Pleier will convey his audience, figuratively, to CERN, the European physics lab in Switzerland. There, Dr. Pleier will lead his audience through 17 miles of underground tunnels making up the Large Hadron Collider and into the seven-story particle detector called ATLAS.

As Dr. Pleier will describe, he and others from Brookhaven and labs around the world use ATLAS to search for evidence of a particle called the Higgs boson, which is thought to be responsible for the mass of all particles — and us.

Presented in conjunction with the start of LHC's high-energy operations, this talk is part of an international series of public lectures by scientists who perform their research using one of the particle detectors at the Large Hadron Collider. Refreshments will be served.