La settimana dal 9 al 13 Febbraio il Professor Gerard 't Hooft della Università di Utrecht, premio Nobel per la fisica 1999, visiterà il nostro dipartimento e la Sezione INFN. Durante la sua visita il Professor 't Hooft terrà un ciclo di seminari rivolti ai fisici, le MAJORANA LECTURES, ed una conferenza pubblica, la ANTONIO BARONE LECTURE, MERCOLEDI' 11 FEBBRAIO ore 15, AULA ROSSA dei centri comuni.
Le mattine di lunedì 9, martedì 10, giovedì 12 e venerd' 13 invece in aula Caianiello si terranno le Majorana lectures.
La Public Lecture sarà fruibile ad un vasto pubblico. Si seguito titolo ed abstract dei due eventi.
Majorana Lectures
From Standard Model to Black Hole Complementarity and Back Again
Gerard 't Hooft
A fundamental domain of the natural world is fundamentally unknown and not understood: what are the laws of nature that control the ultra short distances, or equivalently, what happens with subatomic particles when they collide with amounts of energy that cannot, or not yet, be obtained in the largest experimental facilities that we have at present? A good physical principle that could aid us towards answering this question is missing. In these lectures, we focus on two lines of attack: first, we know that gravitational forces, by causing space and time to be curved, will have to be taken into account, in particular when they become so strong that black holes are formed. Ultra tiny black holes will cause unavoidable complications, but they also point to a revolutionary possibility: the existence of a space-time symmetry connecting the small with the large: conformal symmetry.
An other approach is to address the quantum question: should quantum mechanics continue to rule the world of small things, no matter how small? There are reasons for doubt, and here also, the suspicion of the existence of more powerful principles might help us to obtain better understanding of the sub-micro world. Much of this is speculation, but we can work at the mathematical equations that must be handled, and at least these are clear. In the lectures, the math is exhibited.
Public Lecture
The Higgs particle, pivot of the Standard Model for the subatomic world
Gerard 't Hooft
In the Large Hadron Collider, the most powerful particle accelerator in the world, a particle was recently discovered that was the last essential ingredient for the Standard Model.
Without this particle it was difficult to understand how the other particles can interact the way they were observed to do. Why is this Higgs particle so important to understand the masses of the other particles, and what does this have to do with spin, the fact that all particles, except the Higgs, are fast rotating?