High-Energy Physics: Portrait of the Ultimate Frontier

About this event

Prof. Riva will open the quantum club seminar series 2025-2026 with a talk on High-Energy Physics! María Rodríguez Domínguez will give a 15min warmup talk as her master student. The event will be followed by an aperitif.

Abstract

High-Energy physics is the only quadrant of science that has to deal both with Quantum Mechanics and Relativity. This dual requirement enforces a remarkably rigid framework, within which candidate descriptions of Nature are formulated and tested — from real experiments (colliders, gravitational waves, cosmology, …) to imagined ones (gedanken experiments). The theories that withstand these tests are both beautiful and extraordinarily predictive, describing Nature at scales spanning many orders of magnitude. They enable calculations with accuracies down to one part in a trillion and even implied the inevitable discovery of the Higgs boson at the LHC. And what next?