Inside the Higgs boson

The Higgs boson was the subatomic celebrity particle of the year in 2012, after physicists at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Switzerland announced that maybe, just maybe, they had detected it. Learn more about who found the Higgs boson, how they did it and why it?s so important during a free public lecture on Tuesday, Feb. 12, at the Historic Homestake Opera House at 313 Main St. in Lead, S.D. Physicist Beate Heinemann of the University of California, Berkeley, will speak at 6 p.m. (The social hour, with hors d?oeuvres and a cash bar, begins at 5 p.m.)

Physicists believe we owe a lot to the Higgs boson. In fact, we owe everything. ?According to the theoretical predictions, the Higgs field permeates the universe and all particles acquire mass from its presence,? Heinemann says. Without the Higgs, we would not exist. The search for the Higgs also is related?through an exotic concept called ?supersymmetry?? to research at the Sanford Underground Research Facility in Lead, where scientists are about to begin a search for another never-detected particle, so-called ?dark matter.? Physicist Kevin Lesko of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, who invited Heinemann to talk here, says research at the LHC ?meshes nicely with the dark matter searches researchers are making here.?

Heinemann earned a doctorate in physics from the University of Hamburg in Germany. She has worked at the Tevatron accelerator at Fermi National Accelerator near Chicago, and she is currently an associate professor of physics at UC Berkeley. She also is a member of the ATLAS scientific collaboration, one of the major experiments at the LHC, where the tantalizing ?Higgs-like? particle was detected last year. Heinemann?s talk, "The Observation of a Higgs-like Boson at the LHC,? is part of the Sanford Underground Research Facility?s Deep Science for Everyone lecture series. Cosponsors of Heinemann?s talk include the Lead Chamber of Commerce, the Historic Homestake Opera House and Versatile Carpets and Interiors of Spearfish, S.D.