Programme of Events

The search for the Higgs boson is one of the most important scientific challenges in the world today and an announcement of its discovery, or refutation of its existence, using data taken at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN is imminent.

But what exactly is the Higgs boson? Why is it considered so important? How does the LHC produce and detect it? How do thousands of physicists from around the world combine to track it down? And what is Ireland’s involvement in all this?

Several eminent scientists will take part in a panel discussion to discuss these issues with the public: Prof. Rolf Heuer who is the director general of CERN; Dr. Steve Myers, the ‘Lord of the Rings’ who is in charge of accelerators at CERN; Oxford theorist, Prof. Frank Close, who has written a book about the Higgs; Prof. Themis Bowcock, an experimental physicist working at CERN; and physicist Dr. Tara Shears who works on the LHC and has broadcast widely about particle physics.