Oldenburg. "Higgs, or the illusion of empty space" is the title of the public lecture to be given by Prof. Dr Peter Schleper as part of the Physics Colloquium on Monday, 12 November at 4.15 pm at the University of Oldenburg (Wechloy campus, W2-1-148).

Schleper is a university lecturer at the Institute of Experimental Physics at the University of Hamburg. Together with his research group, he is involved in investigations at the European research centre CERN. In his lecture, he will provide first-hand insights into experiments carried out there and present the latest research results on the so-called Higgs mechanism. A few months ago, a particle was discovered at the research centre's Large Hadron Collider that has many of the properties of the Higgs boson. The Higgs boson is a hypothetical elementary particle named after the British physicist Peter Higgs, which has not yet been proven experimentally.

Symmetries are an indispensable concept in physics in order to decipher the laws of nature. As successful and effective as symmetry considerations often are, they sometimes get in the way when it comes to understanding some fundamental properties of bodies, such as their mass. For an important class of elementary particles, for example, symmetries require zero mass, while it is well established experimentally that these particles are by no means massless. The Higgs mechanism offers an ingenious way of reconciling the validity of symmetry with a non-zero mass.

[05.11.2012]