Who Cares about Particle Physics?

This talk will help you make sense of the Higgs boson, the Large Hadron Collider and CERN, the European Laboratory for Particle Physics. Pauline Gagnon explains, for non-experts, how the current theoretical model called the Standard Model describes the basic constituents of matter. The discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012 brought in the last missing piece of this model but it still only describes « visible matter », that is, everything we see in stars and galaxies. It leaves out « dark matter », a mysterious type of matter five times more prevalent but still completely unknown. Gagnon will show how physicists are currently looking for new particles and a more encompassing theory that would go beyond the Standard Model to explain what dark matter could be. She will also show how fundamental research has impacted our lives and why it is so important.

PAULINE GAGNON was born in Quebec, Canada. After teaching physics for a few years in local colleges, she moved to California, where she completed a PhD in particle physics at University of California in Santa Cruz in 1993. She then started doing research at CERN, the European laboratory for particle physics, and was a senior research scientist at Indiana University until she retired in 2016. Since 2012, Pauline Gagnon has devoted all her time to popular science activities. In her own words, particle physics is too much fun to leave it only to physicists!