Physics on the radio

The School's Dr Victoria Martin has been interviewed about the Atlas project and the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) on BBC Radio Scotland. Follow the link below to listen to the extended interview.

The interview marks a special milestone for the LHC: the accumulation of 1 inverse femtobarn of data from experiments. Dr Martin explains:

"Last week, the LHC reached a milestone by delivering its first inverse femptobarn of integrated luminosity. This means the LHC has now collided 7 trillion pairs of protons. If the Higgs boson exists, and is not too different from our expectations, then about 1 in 10 billion of these collisions will produce a Higgs boson; meaning that ATLAS may have already recorded up to about 5000 Higgs bosons in our data set.

"The challenge for the ATLAS collaboration - including students and staff here in Edinburgh -  is identifying these Higgs bosons from the huge, and very similar, background processes."