Colloquium: Roger Rusack, UMN

Abstract:  Spontaneous symmetry breaking was first used in the late 1950’s to explain the phenomena of superconductivity. Applying the same idea to relativistic gauge theories eventually lead to the observation in 2012 of the Higgs boson at the LHC. In my talk I will briefly describe some of the steps taken going from an obscure idea to this observation. My talk will focus on the experimental challenges that were faced to find the Higgs boson and how a massive global effort to build the Large Hadron Collider to produce the Higgs boson and to construct the detectors to observe it, all came together to make the initial observation. I will outline how, since 2012, we have learnt much about the properties of the Higgs boson in the highly detailed studies conducted by the CMS and ATLAS Collaborations.