NEWNHAM FELLOWS MARIA UBIALI AND TINA POTTER WILL SHARE THEIR PERSONAL EXPERIENCES AS RESEARCHERS IN THE FIELD OF PARTICLE PHYSICS, AND LIFT THE VEIL ON SOME CUTTING-EDGE NEW DISCOVERIES ABOUT THE NATURE OF OUR UNIVERSE
Years of amazing experimental discoveries and mathematical breakthroughs have led the scientific community to build the Standard Model (SM) of particle physics, which encodes our understanding of the smallest building blocks of reality, the elementary particles. With the start of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, particle physics entered a new era, with its most sensational achievement the detection of the Higgs boson.
Although we may think that all pieces of the big jigsaw puzzle of the Standard Model have now been revealed, we know that this model is necessarily incomplete and that there are more huge discoveries to come about how our universe really works. Both Maria and Tina are at the forefront of this endeavour to look at physics in a new way and to answer some of the questions the Standard Model just can’t resolve.
About the Contributors
TINA POTTER is a University Lecturer in the Department of Physics at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Newnham. Her research interests lie particularly in researching the particles that make up Dark Matter. Earlier this year she was awarded a Pilkington Teaching Prize for outstanding and pioneering teaching within the University.
MARIA UBIALI is the Sheila Edmonds Lecturer in Mathematics at Newnham and Principal Investigator of the ‘Physics Beyond the Standard Proton’ project at the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics. Maria set up and runs Newnham’s Maths Summer School. Her work tackles a number of open fundamental questions about the structure of the proton and the origin of our Universe.
Image credit: CERN – The Large Hadron Collider/ATLAS at CERN