Symmetry and Fundamental PhysicsTom Kibble at 80
Imperial College London, March 13th 2013
Program
| Time | Event | Location |
| 10:00-11:00 | Registration and refreshments | Level 8 common room, Blackett Lab |
| 11:00-11:05 | Margaret Dallman | Lecture Theatre 1, Blackett Lab |
| Principal of the Faculty of Natural Sciences, Imperial College
Opening Remarks |
||
| 11:05-12:05 | Neil Turok (Perimeter) | Lecture Theatre 1, Blackett Lab |
| Tom Kibble and the Early Universe as the Ultimate Experiment | ||
| Video of talk | ||
| Lunch | ||
| 14:00-15:00 | Wojciech Zurek (LANL) | Lecture Theatre 1, Blackett Lab |
| Dynamics of Symmetry Breaking Phase Transitions | ||
| Video of talk | ||
| Coffee | ||
| 15:40-16:40 | Jim Virdee (Imperial) | Lecture Theatre 1, Blackett Lab |
| The Quest for the Higgs Boson at the LHC | ||
| Video of talk | ||
| - | ||
| 18:00-19:00 | Steven Weinberg (Univ. of Texas at Austin) | Great Hall, Sherfield building |
| Tom Kibble: breaking symmetries, breaking ground and the new boson | ||
| Video of talk | ||
| 19:00-20:30 | Reception | |
Abstracts
Steven Weinberg (U. of Texas at Austin)Tom Kibble: breaking symmetries, breaking ground and the new boson
The talk will describe my first interaction with Tom Kibble, when I visited Imperial College in 1961-2; Tom's ground-breaking work on broken symmetry and the Higgs boson; and how a 1967 paper by Tom laid the foundation for understanding the photon.
Neil Turok (Perimeter)
Tom Kibble and the Early Universe as the Ultimate Experiment
Tom Kibble was a pioneer of the symmetry breaking paradigm in fundamental physics. His view of physics is exceptionally broad, and Tom also led efforts to see how to test ideas of grand unification through exploring their consequences for the very early universe. Over time, this led to new paradigms for cosmology, like cosmic inflation, with a plethora of observational tests. In this talk, I shall review some of Tom's cosmological innovations and also look forward to new and even more fundamental paradigms capable of tackling the big bang singularity.
Wojciech Zurek (LANL)
Dynamics of Symmetry Breaking Phase Transitions
In a seminal 1976 paper Tom Kibble pointed out that, in cosmological phase transitions, causality precludes coordination between local choices of broken symmetry, and, as a result, formation of topological defects is all but inevitable. I shall discuss consequences of this Kibble mechanism for condensed matter physics, where its experimentally testable extrapolation is being studied.
Jim Virdee (Imperial) The Quest for the Higgs Boson at the LHC
In July 2012 ATLAS and CMS experiments reported the discovery of a Higgs-like boson, most likely confirming the mechanism for generation of mass of fundamental particles put forward by Higgs, Kibble and others in the 1960’s. An outline of the challenges faced during the construction of both the LHC and the experiments will be presented as well as an overview of the current operation and performance. Selected physics results and future aims, in particular those relating to the discovery of the Higgs-like boson, will be discussed.
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