David Tucker-Smith’s “Searching for the Higgs” Next in Faculty Lecture Series

Media contact: Noelle Lemoine, communications assistant; tele: (413) 597-4277; email: [email protected]
WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass., February 17, 2011 – The third talk in this year’s Faculty Lecture Series will take place on Thursday, Feb. 23, given by David Tucker-Smith, associate professor of physics at Williams College. Tucker-Smith’s lecture, titled “Searching for the Higgs at the LHC,” will take place at 4 p.m. in Wege Auditorium, with a reception to follow in Schow atrium. The event is free and open to the public.
Tucker-Smith’s lecture will focus on the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN. The LHC has taught scientists new things about elementary particles and their interactions, and it will continue to push forward the high-energy frontier in the coming years. A major goal of the LHC is to find the Higgs boson, the one ingredient of the standard model of particle physics yet to be discovered. In his talk Tucker-Smith will discuss what the Higgs boson has to do with the mystery of mass, how LHC experimentalists are looking for this elusive particle, and what they’ve learned so far.
After arriving at Williams in 2003, Tucker-Smith received tenure in 2009. His research examines the standard model of particle physics, which describes the interactions of quarks and leptons and has been successful at analyzing data from particle collider experiments. However, the theory is regarded as incomplete, which has spurred many physicists to extend the model. Tucker-Smith examines the structure and phenomenology of these extensions. He studies how various extensions can be tested experimentally.
At Williams, Tucker-Smith has taught courses including Newton, Einstein, and Beyond; Mathematical Methods for Scientists; and Gravity. His research has been published in Physical Review D, Physical Review Letters, the Annual Review of Nuclear and Particle Science, and Nuclear Physics B. Tucker-Smith has received grants for his research from the National Science Foundation and Research Corporation.
Tucker-Smith received his B.A. from Amherst College in 1995 and his Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley in 2001.
The next speaker in the Faculty Lecture Series will be Marjorie Hirsch, associate professor of music, who will present a lecture on March 1 about music of Franz Schubert.
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