The LHC (Large Hadron Collider) is the proton-proton supercollider
built in a 27 km tunnel underneath the Franco-Swiss border near Geneva
that had first beams circulating on Sept 10 2008. The LHC and its
two-general purpose experiments ("ATLAS" and "CMS") present us with
unprecedented challenges in terms of complexity and size in the field of
high-energy physics. This lecture will cover the technology and physics
of the most violent events ever to be observed in the laboratory, the
challenges of extracting new physics from a billion collisions per
second, and the path from detection to discoveries that will address the
most puzzling questions on the composition and dynamics of the Universe.
Maria Spiropulu is an experimental particle physicist.
Born and educated in Greece, she became interested in experimental
physics early on and worked in international laboratories in Europe
(BESSY, CERN) as an undergraduate. She moved to the US in 1993 to pursue
her Ph.D. at the Collider Detector at Fermilab with Harvard University.
She has worked on silicon sensors, calorimetry, trigger and data
acquisition and on searches for physics beyond the standard model. She
used the blind data analysis method for the first time in hadron
collider data. She developed and implemented background determination
methodologies and algorithms (such as the Z-boson "standard candle" and
the "W/Z standard candle transfer" for searches) that have been used at
Fermilab’s experiments and are going to be employed by the experiments
at the LHC. By analyzing the debris of very high energy particle
collisions, she is looking to find whether extra dimensions or
supersymmetric particles are relevant to the physics that connects the
high energy scale of gravity and unification with the scale of
elementary particle masses. She is the recipient of the Enrico Fermi
Fellowship and Compton Lectureship at the University of Chicago. She
lived in the Chicago area since 1994 and moved in 2004 to Geneva,
Switzerland with a staff position at CERN’s Physics Department to
continue her research at the highest energy experiments at the Large
Hadron Collider. During the years 2005-08 she led the the search and
discovery program of the CMS experiment. In 2008 she was elected Fellow
of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.