ASP Online Seminars: The Next Big Thing: Future Particle Colliders Now Coming into Focus - Their Physics Goals and Detector Technology Challenges

by Sally Seidel (University of New Mexico (US))

Tuesday 2 Dec 2025, 14:00 → 15:30 UTC

Abstract:

Controlled particle collisions are one of the ways we learn about the fundamental physical laws of the universe. Unique colliders proposed as well as those under development worldwide are intended to investigate many of the most compelling questions in particle physics and cosmology; these include, for example, the stability of the vacuum, direct production of Dark Matter in the laboratory, and the existence of previously unobserved particles and processes (such as sterile neutrinos or CP violation in the Higgs sector) that could address such puzzles as the origin of the matter-antimatter asymmetry and the tensions in neutrino oscillation data. This talk begins with a survey of particle colliders that have been applied to address high energy physics questions up to the present day; it then looks toward those on the horizon.

 

Bio of the speaker:

Prof. Sally Seidel received her Ph.D. in experimental particle physics from the University of Michigan for a search for nucleon decay using the IMB water Cherenkov detector. As a research scientist with the University of Toronto on the ARGUS Experiment, she participated in the construction of a drift chamber optimized for heavy quark physics and published a study of charmed baryon decay. Sally joined the University of New Mexico faculty in 1991. As a member of the Fermilab CDF experiment, she co-led the upgrade tracker sensor design team and carried out a study of multi-jet final states. She then co-led the ATLAS/LHC Run-1 pixel sensor working group. On ATLAS her analysis team focuses on signatures of new physics in rare decays of B mesons. Her ATLAS analysis work led to the discovery of the excited heavy meson Bc(2S). The Seidel group is also developing technologies for tracking particles at future particle colliders.

ASP-2Dec2025.mp4

ASP-Dec2025.pdf