On 17 February 2022 at 8pm CET, Dr. Karolos Potamianos will give a live public talk on the ATLAS Youtube Channel on the study of the electroweak force and the role it plays in the Universe.

Humans often attribute beauty to symmetry – and it seems the Universe agrees with us. Symmetry is found in Nature at every level. The symmetries of the Standard Model of particle physics can even describe the matter we are made of and its interactions.

But some symmetries are made to be broken. In the Standard Model, the "Higgs mechanism" describes the spontaneous symmetry breaking of the electroweak force. Without this broken symmetry, certain particles in the Universe would have no mass. The Higgs mechanism – and its symmetry breaking nature – was confirmed by the discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012 by the ATLAS and CMS experiments.

In this talk, Dr. Karolos Potamianos will explain how particle physicists are trying to unravel electroweak symmetry breaking by probing the rarest processes predicted by the Standard Model, and discuss what’s ahead on the road to discovering new physics phenomena!

Dr. Karolos Potamianos is an Ernest Rutherford Fellow at the University of Oxford in the UK. He joined ATLAS in 2012. His research focuses on measuring rare Standard Model processes involving interactions of multiple bosons known as "vector boson scattering". He an expert on silicon detectors and is working on a new, all-silicon Inner Tracker detector (ITk) for the ATLAS experiment’s high-luminosity upgrade, as well as on R&D for future experiments.

This event is part of a series of ATLAS Live Public Talks held on YouTube. You can watch more in the dedicated YouTube playlist.