Dr Barry King, Senior Lecturer in the Physics Department at Liverpool University visited St Mary’s College on Wednesday 11th March to deliver a talk about "The Search for the God Particle", otherwise known as ‘Higgs Boson’.

A boson is a type of subatomic particle that imparts a force. The Higgs Boson was proposed in the early 1960s by Professor Peter Higgs of Edinburgh University who suggested that its existence could explain why matter, from atoms to planets, have mass rather than float around the Universe without any mass, like photons of light.

Dr King was in the UK team searching for the Lost Quark and is now in the UK team investigating the Higgs Boson.  He has been working in CERN, six months a year, with the Large Hadron Collider, Atlas, since 2001.

His visit to the College started with one of our own students, Autumn Charnley, delivering a short presentation about her trip to CERN and her studies in Particle Physics.

King then followed with his own introduction to Particle Physics and why it is so important to study and then moved from that on to the Higgs discovery.

Stephen Kirk, Head of Faculty for Science and Maths also invited staff and interested STEM group Science students from St Bede’s and St Augustine’s to the event.

He said, “We were very excited to have secured Dr King as one of our guest speakers and the students from our Science Plus group found the afternoon interesting and very beneficial.  The aim of the Science Plus group is to stretch and challenge the most able students and both inspire and prepare them to apply for highly competitive Science courses at university.  As part of this we welcome many guest speakers throughout the year, from medical admissions tutors to professionals employed in STEM subjects such as engineers and pharmacists”.