High Energy Physics Seminar: What’s the matter with matter?

The Department of Physics is pleased to welcome Dr. Daniel Johnson to give a talk on the high energy physics research at the LHCb experiment at CERN.

From the protons and neutrons in the chair you’re sitting on, to the constituents of the farthest star you might see tonight, most of the visible stuff in the Universe consists of quarks bunched together to form ‘hadrons’. But, hidden in plain sight, is one of the most awkward aspects of modern particle physics: although we possess a theory — quantum chromodynamics (QCD) — which defines, in principle, how quarks bind to form hadrons, real-life calculations with that theory are fiendishly difficult and accurate predictions are often impossible to obtain. The implications of this uncertainty reach across particle physics. Johnson will describe how LHC data have begun a revolution in the understanding of hadronisation, and the implications that could have for searches for ‘New Physics’. Next, realizing that visible matter accounts for only about 15% of the matter in the Universe, he will turn the focus to the remaining 85%, so called ‘dark matter’. Although direct searches for a particle accounting for dark matter have so far drawn a blank, Johnson will discuss a novel dark matter paradigm and how LHC data might be leveraged to shed light on this mysterious topic.

Note: This is a virtual event. Please contact phyadmin@syr.edu for the zoom link.