UBC PHAS part of three Physics World top 10 breakthroughs
The discovery of Higgs-like particle, the observation of time reversal violation, and the measurement of the bulk motion of galaxy clusters, take up three of the top four spots in the top ten breakthroughs in 2012 announced by Physics World. Physics World is the magazine published by the Institute of Physics, one of the largest physics societies in the world.
[UBC Media Release Dec 18, 2012]
Physics professors Colin Gay, Alison Lister, Dave Axen and their team, including Zoltan Gecse , Chang Wei Loh, Bill Mills, Stephen Swedish and Simon Viel, were part of ATLAS - one of the two large international teams (the other being CMS) that jointly discovered a Higgs-like particle at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. Physicists have been trying to prove the existence of the Higgs boson for almost 50 years and its discovery completes the Standard Model of particle physics – making it the most important physics breakthrough so far in the 21st century.
Physics professors Chris Hearty, Janis McKenna, Tom Mattison and students Dave Asgeirsson and Rocky So took part in the first direct measurement of time reversal violation using the BaBar detector in California – a step towards verifying quantum field theory that is also 50 years in the making. The UBC faculty members were also among the founding members of this experiment in 1994 and made the Physics World top 10 list in 2001 and 2003.
Professor Mark Halpern and postdoctoral fellows Graeme Addison and Elia Battistelli were part of a team that used the Atacama Cosmology Telescope to make the first measurement of the bulk motion of galaxy clusters. The observation, first proposed by a Russian physicist 40 years ago, is coined as a triumph of precision cosmology and could help us better understand how the Universe was formed and shed light on the mysterious dark matter and dark energy.
For more information, visit:
Physics World Top 10 Breakthroughs for 2012
UBC Media Release - UBC scientists part of three PhysicsWorld's top 10 breakthroughs
Higgs-like particle:
- Scientific article on the observation of Higgs-like particle - "Observation of a new particle in the search for the Standard Model Higgs boson with the ATLAS detector at the LHC"
- The UBC ATLAS Group Website
- Scientific article on the observation of time reversal violation - "Observation of Time Reversal Violation in the B0 Meson System"
- The UBC BaBar Group Website
- Scientific article on the measurement of the bulk motion of galaxy clusters - "Evidence of Galaxy Cluster Motions with the Kinematic Sunyaev-Zel'dovich Effect"
- The Experimental Cosmology Group Website