HHS Gets Physical

On Monday, May 15th, Anders Ryd came to Homer High School to talk about general physics and his involvement with the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). Ryd was in the high school library from twelve to two-thirty in the afternoon. He grew up in southern Sweden and originally attended college to study mathematics. He changed to physics, however, and has been in the field ever since. He came to the United States to study abroad at University of California, Santa Barbara, and has since been living in the United States.

Ryd’s lecture covered many topics. He explained that the universe is 13.8 billion years old and how it is made up of 73% dark energy, 23% dark matter, 3.6% hydrogen gas, and .4% stars and other materials. He also lectured about photons, gluons, bullet clusters, causality, and the Higgs Boson.

Dr. Ryd also spoke about his involvement in particle accelerators. He worked at the Cornell Synchrotron for many years, but since the LHC opened, he has focused his work there. The LHC is run by CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research and opened in 2008. It is a particle accelerator with a 16.7 circumference and buried over 500 feet below ground. The LHC can be found on the border between Switzerland and France, near Geneva. Ryd works specifically at the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS). Currently, his group is developing a pixel detector. Now that all of the quarks and leptons have been discovered, there are plans to revamp the LHC by 2030 to aid the exploration of the properties of dark matter.

Ryd said he enjoyed coming to the high school to let the younger generation know what cutting-edge scientists are up to and to excite some to pursue a scientific field. A student commented, “I found his presentation very interesting, and it was fun to learn that a farm boy from Switzerland could become a quantum physicist.”