General Physics Colloquium

Title:

The Future of Fundamental Interactions

Speaker:

Francesco Sannino, University of Southern Denmark

Abstract:

Highly ambitious scientific experiments around the world are currently unveiling Nature's innermost secrets. On July 4th 2012 the Large Hadron Collider experiments at CERN announced the discovery of a new subatomic particle, the Higgs, revealing information about the basic laws of the universe. This discovery heralds a new and extremely exciting era in high-energy physics.

At the same time the cosmic frontier is being explored by the Planck mission of ESA's Horizon Program. Planck will lead to unprecedented heights in the understanding of the early universe and the origin of cosmic structure.

Many more state-of-the-art experiments are searching for direct or indirect traces of a mysterious form of non-luminous matter. This dark matter is five times more abundant than atoms, the bright matter.

It is a fact, however, that the current description of fundamental interactions is theoretically and phenomenologically unsatisfactory. I will review the main issues about the current underlying description of fundamental interactions and then I will describe new interesting scenarios for the future generation of theories of nature.

Coffee and cake will be served at 15:05