Physicist Fabiola Gianotti announced in July 2012 that a team at CERN had discovered a particle consistent with the Higgs boson, predicted by the Standard Model of particle physics, that is crucial to understanding physics and the structure and evolution of the universe.
Gianotti discussed the unprecedented challenges that were overcome to find the once-theoretical elementary particle, Nov. 13, 2013 as part of the Hans Bethe Lecture Series at Cornell.
The Hans Bethe Lectures, established by the Department of Physics and the College of Arts and Sciences, honor Bethe, a Cornell professor of physics from 1936 until his death in 2005 who won the Nobel Prize in physics in 1967 for his description of the nuclear processes that power the sun.