Higgs-a-palooza at the LHC?

Just before Christmas two experimental collaborations (ATLAS and CMS) at CERN announced they had seen evidence for the Higgs particle. Maybe. The discovery of the Higgs was one of the selling points for building the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN; has it really been found? What is it anyway, and why was it predicted to exist? This talk summarizes the story so far at the LHC (how it works and how they broke it); what the Higgs particle is and why (and how reliably) it was predicted to be there; and the evidence for what it is they (may have) found.

I was born in Manitoba and was raised in various places around Western Canada, Ontario and Europe. I received my B.Sc. in a co-op programme, with a joint honours in Physics and Applied Math from the University of Waterloo.

I did my doctoral work in Theoretical Particle Physics at the University of Texas in Austin under the supervision of Steven Weinberg. After doing a postdoctoral stint at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, in 1987 I joined the faculty at McGill University, where I was made James McGill Professor in 2003.

I am presently a professor with McMaster University's department of Physics and Astronomy and am an Associate Member at the Perimeter Institute. I was a Killam Fellow from 2005 - 2007 and elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 2008. I received the Canadian Association of Physicists/Centre de Recherches Mathematiques (CAP-CRM) prize for theoretical physics in 2010.