Conveners
Keynote Talk: "Higgs and the new fundamental interactions"
- Gavin Salam (U. Oxford)
Description
Particle physicists often talk of four fundamental forces, or interactions: gravity, electromagnetic, weak and strong. Yet particle physicists' standard model has long predicted a new short-range force, associated with the Higgs boson. Unlike the electromagntic, weak and strong forces, its interaction strength does not seem to be a multiple of any underlying basic unit such as the electric charge. Nor does it simply couple to mass in the way that gravity does.
This new "Higgs" force is hypothesised to shape our world in crucial ways, for example ensuring stability of the proton. Yet it is only in the past two years that experiments at the Large Hadron Collider have succeeded in directly observing it. In this talk I will give an overview of what we know of this unique new force, of questions about
it that we know in principle how to answer with future colliders, and of others that we still have no idea how to address.
