Benjamin Carlson of Westmont College

Over a decade ago, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN opened a new era of fundamental physics with the discovery of the Higgs boson. This talk will discuss what comes next, including how the LHC could be used to search for answers to other big questions in modern physics, such as the nature of dark matter. The LHC plans to continue taking data for another 20 years, and this talk will discuss the long-term physics goals and experimental challenges, including tools for implementing machine learning algorithms into high-speed electronics.  

Biography:

Dr. Benjamin Carlson, Assistant Professor of Physics at Westmont College works on the LHC's ATLAS experiment, which is the largest detector ever constructed for a particle collider. He works with undergraduate students, in a unique program supported by the NSF. In particular, he looks for hints of new particles in decays of the Higgs boson. Dr. Carlson also works on the ATLAS trigger system, which determines which collisions should be saved within a fraction of a second. He received his Ph.D. in physics from Carnegie Mellon University and was the Samuel Langley postdoctoral scholar at the University of Pittsburgh before coming to Westmont.