The Department of Physics welcomes Nigel Lockyer, director of Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, as the 2014 Lederman Lecturer. He will speak at 3:30 pm on Thursday, March 13, 2013 in the Life Sciences Building, Room 111. The IIT community is invited to attend. Lockyer will discuss “The Higgs Is One Piece of the Mass Puzzle: Toward a New Understanding of the Quantum Universe.” A reception will follow at 5 pm. Click to rsvp.

Abstract

Three landmark discoveries have led to a revolution in understanding of the universe’s fundamental particles. The top quark turned out to be inexplicably heavy, with a mass 300,000 times greater than the electron. Neutrinos were found to be surprisingly light–100 billion times lighter than the top quark–and to morph into each other as they travel through space and time. The long-sought Higgs boson, discovered at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in 2012, provides only part of the explanation for the wide range of particle masses. Now, the world’s particle physicists have embarked on an ambitious program to solve the mystery of mass through experiments at the LHC and at Fermilab.

About the Speaker

Lockyer began his tenure as director of Fermi in September 2013. He is an experimental particle physicist who spent two decades as a professor at the University of Pennsylvania. His research focused on high‐energy particle physics experiments using Fermilab’s Tevatron particle collider and applications of particle physics technologies to medicine. In 2005 Lockyer became the director of TRIUMF, Canada’s national laboratory for nuclear and particle physics.

Lockyer holds a Ph.D. in physics from Ohio State University, is a fellow of the American Physical Society and received its 2006 Panofsky Prize for his leading research on the bottom quark.

About the Lecture

The Lederman Lecture is named in honor of Leon Lederman, IIT’s former Pritzker Professor of Physics, and winner of the 1988 Nobel prize in physics.