Most Wanted Particle: The Inside Story of the Hunt for the Higgs, the Heart of the Future of Physics

Most Wanted Particle: The Inside Story of the Hunt for the Higgs, the Heart of the Future of Physics

Most Wanted Particle: The Inside Story of the Hunt for the Higgs, the Heart of the Future of Physics

Most Wanted Particle: The Inside Story of the Hunt for the Higgs, the Heart of the Future of Physics

Paperback(Reprint)

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Overview

Now in paperback: the “vivid account of what the process of discovery was really like for an insider.”—Peter Higgs

Particle physics as we know it depends on the Higgs boson: It’s the missing link between the birth of our universe—as a sea of tiny, massless particles—and the tangible world we live in today. But for more than 50 years, scientists wondered: Does it exist?

Physicist Jon Butterworth was at the frontlines of the hunt for the Higgs at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider—perhaps the most ambitious experiment in history. In Most Wanted Particle, he gives us the first inside account of that uncertain time, when an entire field hinged on a single particle, and life at the cutting edge of science meant media scrutiny, late-night pub debates, dispiriting false starts in the face of intense pressure, and countless hours at the collider itself. As Butterworth explains, our first glimpse of the elusive Higgs brings us a giant step closer to understanding the universe—and points the way to an entirely new kind of physics.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781615193011
Publisher: The Experiment, LLC
Publication date: 03/08/2016
Edition description: Reprint
Pages: 304
Product dimensions: 5.40(w) x 8.10(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Jon Butterworth is a professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at University College London and a member of the ATLAS collaboration at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider in Geneva, Switzerland. He writes the Life and Physics blog for the Guardian, has written articles for a range of publications including the BBC and New Scientist, and is also the author of Most Wanted Particle, shortlisted for Book of the Year by Physics World. He was awarded the Chadwick Medal of the Institute of Physics in 2013 for his pioneering experimental and phenomenological work in high-energy particle physics. For the last fifteen years, he has divided his time between London and Geneva.

Lisa Randall is a theoretical physicist and Frank B. Baird, Jr. Professor of Science at Harvard University. She is the author of Dark Matter and the DinosaursWarped PassagesKnocking on Heaven’s Door, and Higgs Discovery.

Table of Contents

Foreword Lisa Randall ix

Preface to the Paperback Edition xiii

Introduction 1

Chapter 1 Before the Data 3

Chapter 2 Restart 38

Chapter 3 High Energy 61

Chapter 4 Standard Model 100

Chapter 5 Rumours and Limits 132

Chapter 6 First Higgs Hints and Some Crazy Neutrinos 170

Chapter 7 Closing In 198

Chapter 8 Discovery 224

Chapter 9 What Next? 242

Acknowledgements 275

Index 277

About the Author 288

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