Mike Albrow

Mike Albrow - Guest Presenter

Says Mike: "Over the last 40 years physicists have developed what they call the "Standard Model", which describes all the known particles of matter and the forces between them, together with the General Theory of Relativity which appears to describe gravity.Both experimenters and theorists are trying hard to find some physical phenomenon which disagrees with this "SM", as that would help progress towards a more complete or more unified theory.Implications from cosmology that most of the Universe is unknown "stuff", called dark matter and dark energy, could be such a breakthrough."

Mike Albrow was born and raised in England but is an American Citizen.He obtained a Ph.D. in elementary particle physics at Manchester University (UK) in 1969 and did post-doctoral research at CERN, the European particle physics laboratory in Geneva, Switzerland.He spent 18 years there, met his wife Christiane and had two daughters. (One is still in Geneva and the other lives in Madagascar!) He worked on experiments at the first accelerator to collide counter-rotating proton beams, discovering scattering between quarks (which are thousands of times smaller than protons).After two years as a professor at Stockholm University, 15 years ago he came to Fermilab and has been doing experiments there at the Tevatron, the world's highest energy proton collider.He is also (with 2000 other physicists!) preparing an experiment for the higher energy Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, due to start up in 2007.