School Of Physics Fall Colloquium Series-Dr. Young Kee Kim

Young Kee Kim (U Chicago and APS) It's all about mass

Speaker: Young Kee Kim (U Chicago and APS)

Host: Harold Kim

Title: It's all about mass

Abstract:
Subatomic-particle research has made enormous progress in the 20th Century by looking inside matter at deeper and deeper levels.  It is as if we were peeling the layers of an onion in the hopes of finding more basic rules for the structure of nature. Great experiments of the 20th century have led to the discovery of ever-smaller entities that make up what were once thought to be indivisible particles.  Moreover, the theory of the very small has been shown to be intimately connected to the largest scales imaginable – cosmology and the beginnings of the universe.  Despite these considerable successes, the current theory has within it the seeds of its own demise and is predicted to break down when probed at even smaller scales. One of such examples is the origin of mass of fundamental particles. We have achieved a beautiful and profound understanding of how fundamental particles acquire their mass, but the mass values remain deeply mysterious. In addition, we learned that ordinary matter supplies only a small fraction of mass in the Universe. We continue to peel away at the more hidden layers of truth with the hope of discovering a more elegant and complete theory.  

 
Bio:

Young-Kee Kim, Albert Michelson Distinguished Service Professor of Physics at University of Chicago, is an experimental particle physicist focusing on understanding the origin of mass. Before joining U.Chicago in 2003, she was a professor at University of California, Berkeley. She served as Deputy Director at Fermilab (2006-2013). 

She received her B.S. and M.S. from Korea University, South Korea, and Ph.D. from the University of Rochester, and was a Postdoctoral Fellow at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

She is an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a Fellow of American Physical Society, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the Sloan Foundation, as well as the recipient of the Ho-Am Prize and the Arthur L. Kelly Faculty Prize.

Event Details

Date/Time:

  • Date: 
    Monday, November 18, 2024 - 3:30pm to 4:30pm

Location:
 Marcus Nanotechnology 1117-1118