Studying the top quark at the LHC - Live talk and Q&A with Dr Maria Moreno Llácer

The top quark is unique among the known quarks. It is the heaviest known fundamental particle and decays before forming bound states. It interacts with the four fundamental forces of nature and three of them are mediated by intermediate particles, known as gauge bosons. Given its size, it strongly interacts with the Higgs boson and is predicted to have strong interactions with hypothetical new particles.

Although top quarks don't play a role in everyday life, they can be produced in accelerators. Indeed, the Large Hadron Collider at CERN is a “top factory” – hundreds of millions of top quarks have been produced at the LHC and are being analysed by ATLAS scientists. Measuring the properties of the top quark, like its mass and interactions with other particles, is one of priorities of the ATLAS physics programme. It provides crucial input to the Standard Model and insight to searches for new physics processes.

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Dr. María Moreno Llácer is a senior researcher working at the Instituto de Física Corpuscular, a
joint centre of the University of Valencia and the Spanish Research Council (CSIC), Spain. She has been a member of the ATLAS Experiment since 2007. Her research focuses on studying two of the most special elementary particles of the Standard Model: the Higgs boson and the top quark. Understanding the interaction of these two particles among themselves and with the
others, as well as precise measurements of their properties and searches for "new
physics", are the main objectives of her research. She has also contributed to data taking at the control room, the commissioning of the detector, and upgrades and developments for the future LHC runs.

Dr Llácer has been awarded with three research prizes: the Young Investigator Award in Experimental Physics 2018 from the Royal Spanish Physics Society and BBVA Foundation; the Leona Woods Distinguished Postdoctoral Lectureship Award 2018 from Brookhaven National Lab; and the XV Ciutat d'Algemesí Scientific-Technical Award.

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#CERN #LiveScience #LHC #LiveTalk #particlephysics

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Great talk.. thanks Dr. Llacer and CERN .