Session A4: Industrial Physics Forum: Frontiers in Physics

Has the Higgs Boson Been Discovered? Latest Results from the ATLAS Experiment at the LHC

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN has had a very successful first data taking run that ended in December 2012. The ATLAS detector has collected about 25 fb$^{-1}$ of integrated luminosity of proton-proton collisions at a center-of-mass energy of 8 TeV. The LHC is the highest energy particle accelerator in the world. The highest profile result has been the announcement of the discovery of a new particle at a mass of about 125 GeV/c$^{2}$, consistent with the long sought Higgs Boson. I will start by describing why there is such excitement about this discovery and why it is not just ``another'' new particle -- if it is indeed the Higgs Boson, it is not only the last missing piece of the Standard Model, but represents a fundamentally new type of particle. The discovery comes after almost two decades of construction of the particle accelerator (LHC) and some of the most complex scientific instruments ever built. I will focus on and describe the ATLAS detector and how it works. The ATLAS experiment, together with CMS experiment, announced the discovery of this new particle in July 2012. I will present the latest results on the properties of this new ``Higgs-like'' particle and the prospects for future discoveries at the LHC.   

Quantum Computing

Quantum mechanics plays a crucial role in many day-to-day products, and has been successfully used to explain a wide variety of observations in Physics. While some quantum effects such as tunneling limit the degree to which modern CMOS devices can be scaled to ever reducing dimensions, others may potentially be exploited to build an entirely new computing architecture: The quantum computer. In this talk I will review several basic concepts of a quantum computer. Why quantum computing and how do we do it? What is the status of several (but not all) approaches towards building a quantum computer, including IBM's approach using superconducting qubits? And what will it take to build a functional machine? The promise is that a quantum computer could solve certain interesting computational problems such as factoring using exponentially fewer computational steps than classical systems. Although the most sophisticated modern quantum computing experiments to date do not outperform simple classical computations, it is increasingly becoming clear that small scale demonstrations with as many as 100 qubits are beginning to be within reach over the next several years. Such a demonstration would undoubtedly be a thrilling feat, and usher in a new era of controllably testing quantum mechanics or quantum computing aspects. At the minimum, future demonstrations will shed much light on what lies ahead.   

Catching the Light: the Giant Magellan Telescope

There has been an explosion of theoretical work outlining how the first galaxies might have formed 13 billion years ago. The Giant Magellan Telescope (GMT) is to be the first of three extremely large ground-based telescopes capable of confronting theory with detailed observations of primordial galaxies. With a collecting area approaching 400 square meters and adaptive optics to remove the image blurring of the earth's turbulent atmosphere, the GMT offers a huge leap in sensitivity over the largest existing telescopes. Building a high-performance telescope of this scale relies on recent technical advances in optics and electronics. I describe the major technical challenges addressed in the GMT's design, and offer a glimpse of ground-based astronomy with extremely large telescopes a decade hence.   

Frontiers of the Physics of Carbon Nanotubes

Carbon nanotubes entered the scene of materials physics about 20 years ago, exhibiting unusual structures and properties stemming from their strong sp2 carbon bonds, their lower mass density, their very large length-to-diameter ratio, and their ability to be either semiconducting or metallic depending on their tube diameter and the orientation of their in-plane hexagons relative to their tube axis. You might ask what potential applications could be envisioned for such unusual nano structures, and what practical application have in fact been realized to date. This will be the focus of my presentation.