Skip to content
Jump to

Overview

 

By Dr Tara Shears, Royal Society University Research Fellow, University of Liverpool
 
Deep beneath the Swiss countryside, final touches are being made to the world's largest piece of scientific equipment the Large Hadron Collider (or LHC for short). The LHC is the most powerful particle accelerator ever built. It is capable of recreating the very energetic conditions last seen in the universe a billionth of a second after the Big Bang, and allows particle physicists to study the fundamental ingredients of matter that the universe was formed of at the time. Amazingly, it will do this 40 million times a second, and use enormous high tech experiments to record what happens.

Why would we want to go to such lengths to explore the structure of matter? In this lecture, Tara Shears will discuss how the LHC will help scientists learn more about the nature of matter and expand the frontiers of our knowledge further than ever.
 
Tara Shears is a particle physicist and Royal Society University Research Fellow at the University of Liverpool. Since obtaining her PhD in 1995 she has worked on experiments at CERN, the European Centre for Particle Physics, in Switzerland, and at Fermilab in America. Her research interests focus on the properties of bottom quarks and the light they may throw on new fundamental particles and interactions.
 
This lecture is FREE. No advance booking or registration required.
 
If you have a question you would like to ask the speaker, please contact between 6.30-7.10pm and it will be passed to the Chair and may be included in the question session at the end of the lecture. We cannot guarantee to answer all questions during question session.