Sarah Eno, University of Maryland
November 25, 2014

On July 4, 2012, the CMS and ATLAS collaborations announced the discovery a new particle whose properties were consistent with those predicted for the long-sought Higgs boson. This discovery is both a triumph of the Standard Model of forces and particles developed during the middle of the last century, and of "Big Science", or science done in large, international collaborations using massive, elaborate, expensive detectors. In this talk, I'll give an overview of the significance of the Higgs particle to physics, but I'll also do my best to explain why (using the example of the CMS collaboration), the paper announcing this discovery had 2892 authors from 168 institutions.

I'll describe what it is like to work in such a large collaboration, the individual contributions to the Higgs result from the many authors, and the benefits to graduate and undergraduate students working in this environment.

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