Insights into subatomic particle physics coming to Okanagan College April 15

Okanagan College Media Release

If your curiosity extends to the world of high-energy experimental subatomic particle physics, mark Friday, April 15 on your calendar for a presentation by Dr. Andreas Warburton of McGill University.

Warburton, who has worked at the University of Toronto and Cornell University, will speak about the first results from the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). The LHC is the world’s largest scientific instrument that has been operating at the CERN laboratory near Geneva since March 30, 2010.

The presentation is organized by Okanagan College’s Physics and Astronomy Department and sponsored by the Canadian Association of Physicists. It starts at 7 p.m. in Rm. H115 of the Kelowna campus of Okanagan College and there is no cost for admission.

Warburton’s presentation will focus on the developments in high-energy experimental subatomic particle physics. It will include a discussion of the Large Hadron Collider machine performance, the complex experiments that are now recording collisions at increasing rates, and a selection of early important physics results now emerging at these new frontier energies.

After graduating from the University of Victoria with a Bachelor of Science degree in 1991, Warburton moved to the University of Toronto where his graduate work involved the Tevatron matter-antimatter collider on the Collider Detector at Fermilab (CDF). Seven years later, having earned his PhD, Warburton moved to Cornell University to work on studies of quark-flavour transitions in hadrons produced in electron-positron collisions.

He return to Canada and McGill in 2003 where he started work on next-generation CDF experiment at Fermilab and the ATLAS experiment at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland. (There are 3,000 scientists, 38 countries, and 174 universities involved in that experiment).