Vanguard

Issue date: 11/5/07 Section: News

"It is the beauty of nature we [the physicists] are trying to understand. Nature is beauty," said Dr. Romulus Godang, professor of physics at the University of South Alabama.
However, this beauty holds many mysteries that the Standard Model of physics cannot explain. Physicists from around the world are "hunting for new a model of physics" to help fill in the explanatory gaps.
Last Friday, the University of South Alabama Department of Physics hosted a colloquium on this topic. Guest speaker Dr. Alakabha Datta, a High Energy Physics theorist from the University of Mississippi, presented a talk that focused on the need for a new physics and what a new physics might look like.
One of the biggest mysteries in physics is what happened to all the anti-matter. At the beginning of the Big Bang, matter and anti-matter were produced in equal amounts, but today matter is dominant. This uneven disappearance of anti-matter as compared to matter is known as "CP Violation." The Standard Model of physics can accurately explain much of the CP Violation, but not all of it. Many theorists posit the existence of an additional basic particle, known as the Higgs boson, to help close the explanatory gap, according to Datta.
However, this Higgs boson particle has not yet been discovered.
"The theorist make models, and the experimentalist prove it," said Godang. "It is now the experimentalists job to find the Higgs."
The prospects of discovering this new particle are highly exciting to all in the field. Many physicist, including Godang, believe whoever finds the Higgs boson will receive the next Nobel Prize Laureate in Physics.
"Nobel Prize is still out there. The question is 'Who will get it?'" said Godang. "Hopefully, USA will be a part of it."
The University of South Alabama currently has two professors working on projects whose aims are, among other things, committed to the discovery of the Higgs boson particle.
Dr. Merrill Jenkins, professor of physics at the University of South Alabama, leads the University's High Energy Physics group. Godang is the departments other high-energy physicist.
Dr. Godang has been an active member of the BaBar experiment since 2001. The BaBar detector was built at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center and is operated by Stanford University for the U.S. Department of Energy, in order to study the millions of B mesons produced by the PEP-II storage ring. The PEP-II facility consists of two independent storage rings. The high-energy ring stores a 9 GeV electron beam (1 GeV is one billion electron volts). The low-energy ring stores 3.1 GeV positron beam.

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