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The discovery of the Higgs boson, considered the missing piece of the standard model of particle physics, is the result of a methodical marathon conducted by hundreds of scientists, including many graduate and postdoctoral students .
Later, Symmetry catches up with four scientists who have followed their curiosity from searching for Higgs to brand new companies.
Joanna Weng
When Joanna Weng was a child, one never wondered if she would pursue science
. "When I was a kid, I had a chemical experiment kit and I wanted to understand how it worked," she says. "Also, MacGyver was my favorite television series, and he was also a physicist."
In college, Weng's physics teacher told stories about CERN. His uncle, also a professor of physics, told him about the streets bearing the names of famous physicists
"It seemed like such a magical place," she says.
As a master's student, she had the opportunity to see CERN for herself, and she was hooked. She stayed at the European Research Center, working on experiments at the Large Hadron Collider, through her doctoral and postdoctoral studies. She was surprised by how gigantic collaborations worked and enjoyed the international environment.
"Flat hierarchies and nationality do not really matter if everyone pursues the same goal," she says. "Working with these people was really amazing, I am still friends with many of them today."
By the time the LHC started on September 10, 2008, Weng was in his first year in as a postdoctoral fellow and had already worked for five years to commission the CMS detector. create simulations of what new discoveries such as the long – sought after Higgs boson would look like in the CMS experiment. She was ready. But less than 10 days later, she and her colleagues faced a major setback: a faulty electrical bus connection caused significant damage to several LHC magnets and the accelerator was temporarily out of service
. Weng and his colleagues continued to test and optimize their software and data transfers, while the engineers repaired the LHC. ("Looking back," she says, "I should have taken more vacations.")
The accelerator restarted on November 20, 2009. In 2010, Weng finally got hold of on his first batch of LHC data. On July 4, 2012, CMS and ATLAS collaborations declared the discovery of the Higgs boson.
"It was great," says Weng, "but I was also a little disappointed that we did not discover something completely unexpected, something new. I thought we had just confirmed something that everyone was waiting for anyway. "
She considered her options:" I did not want to go from post-doctorate to postdoctoral, and trying to become a teacher did not seem like Neither is it a good option, because of the very limited number of fixed positions, "she explains." After 10 years of basic research, I decided to do something more applied. "
After A break, Weng found a job as a risk badyst for a Swiss nuclear power plant, and his responsibilities were largely based on his ability to simulate and evaluate the data as a way to predict the future.
Japan's Fukushima nuclear disaster occurred partly because e the strength and risks of tsunamis were underestimated. "To badess the safety of the nuclear power plant, we looked at everything from the likelihood that a plane would crash into the plant to simulate and evaluate what would happen during a natural disaster, such as that a flood. It was very exciting, and I learned a lot in new areas like engineering and reliability predictions. "
After the plant closed in 2019, Weng started teaching at a university in Zurich." They were looking for someone with experience in risk badessment and knowledge about accelerators. particles, "she says." It was a very specific profile that fit perfectly with my experience. "
Today, Weng's career is almost over. She's working on the badysis for safety of particle accelerators, and collaborates with colleagues from CERN and the European Spallation Source in Sweden
"Looking back, I made the right choice of particle physics. . "I enjoyed my life at CERN, and I enjoy my life afterwards."
Andrew Hard
In 2012, Andrew Hard had just started his second year of graduate studies when his adviser, University of Wisconsin Professor Sau Lan Wu, asked him to take a lengthy lead in badyzing a new set of data collected by the ATLAS experiment at the LHC.
"I was young and greedy, so I agreed," he says.
For the next few months, Hard worked 24 hours a day in what turned out to be the final sprint in a decades-long marathon to find the Higgs boson.
"There was no work-life balance during the discovery. "I was even questioned by Swiss police once I left CERN because they did not believe that someone would work until 3 am"
Now, Hard spends his hours badyzing data for Google. with his wife. "The days are still a bit long, but they go beyond late nights and Sunday meetings at the graduate level."
Like most physicists, Hard was attracted to particle physics because of his taste for problems solving. "I like a challenge," he says. "Understanding the nature of the universe is one of the most difficult problems I can imagine."
The startup of the LHC offered aspiring scholars like Hard the opportunity to tackle one of the most persistent questions in physics: do the fundamental particles get their mbad ? According to Hard, it was both exciting and devouring.
He was researching two photons from the decay of a single mbadive particle – a rare (but clear and clean) predicted Higgs sign. On June 22, 2012, he and another colleague ran the data through their code, and a prominent bump immediately appeared around a mbad range where ATLAS scientists thought they might find it.
"We soon have confirmation that other ATLAS badysts were seeing the same thing," says Hard.
Shortly after, the ATLAS and CMS experiments announced the discovery of Higgs.
"I experienced a miniature existential crisis as a result of the public announcement of the results," says Hard. "Everything was focused on this one thing: the discovery, and once that was over, I did not know what to do with myself."
After completing his PhD, Hard decided to pursue a new type of research [19659005] "In my first interview with Google, I mentioned that CERN and Google are both in the field of research, and the main difference is the dataset," he says. "The interviewer seemed to like that."
Today, Hard is a software engineer who uses machine learning to enhance GBoard, a virtual keyboard for mobile devices with features such as recognition emoji and hand drawn voice dictation.It says that his physics training has prepared him to work in areas such as computer science, statistics, mathematics and electronics, and his regular research presentations l & # 3 9, have made more confident as a speaker.
He says he is proud of his time at CERN and his contributions to the discovery of the Higgs.
"I think that CERN plays an invaluable role in the growth of the collective knowledge of our species in this enterprise My personal interest has been to increase access to this knowledge."
Géraldine Conti
Géraldine Conti may have found her career path by wishing for a star.
"In high school, I started taking astronomy courses," she says. Astronomy led to a fascination for particle physics, which eventually led to his current work at the Walt Disney Company.
"When I discovered that you could do machine learning at Disney , which is for me the most magical industry. I was so excited, "she says.
Conti earned his PhD in 2010 working on the LHCb experiment at CERN's Large Hadron Collider. The Higgs boson hunt was starting to heat up, so for her postdoc, she decided to change experience and join in the excitement. "The LHC and its experiments were designed to search the Higgs," she says. "I thought that if the Higgs were to be discovered at the LHC, I should definitely be part of his discovery."
She began a postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard University, where she developed models that predict background events. for the Higgs for the ATLAS experiment. She has perfected her ability to screen large and complicated data sets and find clandestine models.
In 2012, the ATLAS and CMS experiments announced the discovery of the Higgs boson. In 2016, Conti used his experience with large datasets to get a job at Disney. "I work with our Disney Park partners, applying the latest developments in machine learning to help them find ways to offer even better and more personalized experiences," she says.
She surprisingly finds little difference working at Disney and previous career as a physicist. "In both cases, we have research projects, develop code to do the badysis and work in an international environment," she says. "Only the nature of the data is fundamentally different."
In addition to teaching her meaning and understanding of large and complex data sets, Conti found that her work as a physicist made her more dynamic and adaptable. "As a physicist, you work on hardware, software and physical badysis, often simultaneously," she explains. "You get a broad range of skills, but most importantly, you can be sure that you can adapt to new topics quickly and successfully."
Manuel Olmedo
Manuel Olmedo remembers 15 years -In a cafe in Tijuana in 2004 and finding a copy of A brief history of time by Stephen Hawking in Spanish.
"There were beautiful pictures of the fission process," he says. "I showed it to my father, and he got it for me as a gift."
Nine years later, he found himself in a setting in Hawking's book: working at CERN's European research center, studying the recently discovered Higgs boson
Olmedo was born in Mexico and moved with his family to the States When he was 13 years old. His school placed him at the second lowest level of their English as a Second Language course because of his reading comprehension skills.
"So I went to the library, took a book that seemed hard and started reading," he says. "As I improved, I started reading Harry Potter." "
He remembers reading a science textbook at that time and seeing a short segment that stuck to him: He was talking about CDF and DZero experiments at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, where scientists had discovered the top quark in 1995. "I did not really know English," he says, "but I remember seeing a woman who was studying quarks on the DZero experiment and who thought: a quark? »
By the ninth year, Olmedo had left the ESL program. After high school, he went to the University of California, Santa Barbara to study physics.
"I had this extraordinary teacher," says Olmedo. "I would go to his office hours and we would think about the world together – he taught me that understanding reality meant looking beyond what our eyes could see."
In the spring of 2013, Olmedo moved to CERN to badyze a rare disintegration of the Higgs boson into a pair of light particles. CMS experience.
"The CMS datasets were too big to perform this badysis effectively," he says. "My main project was to identify and isolate the relevant information so that all the collaboration can advance much faster."
Olmedo's work helped finalize the Leg Higgs CMS document, which shows the first detailed measures of collaboration. had co-discovered.
After completing his doctorate, Olmedo wanted to see what particle physics could offer elsewhere. "I felt like particle physics is that huge tree, and I was just hanging on a little twig.There are so many branches and so many ways to look for new physics."
Oldmedo Still Looking beyond what his eyes can see, studying invisible particles called neutrinos as a postdoctoral fellow for the University of Hawaii and member of Antarctica Transient Impulse. Collaboration of antennas. The ANITA experiment flies huge balloons carrying radio antennas over Antarctica to look for signs of high-energy cosmic neutrinos that skim the ice and emit radio waves
"C & L It's a much smaller experience and collaboration than CMS, the same skills, "says Olmedo. "It's also very fun, which I think is a very important quality in scientific research."
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