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High School Physics Department: PA Lecture “A High Energy Person in High Energy Physics” Held

September 4, 2024

On September 3, Billy Wang—studying high energy physics at Caltech—came to SHSID campus to give a lecture “A High Energy Person in High Energy Physics” about his research and resources for college research.


Starting with an introduction of himself, he introduced what people research in high-energy physics. High energy is a realm in physics that studies particles and antiparticles—specifically, the annihilation of particles and how to use them. The annihilation of particles occurs when a particle and its antiparticle collide, to release a source of energy in photons. This could even be used for medical purposes to help recognize things like tumors or other abnormalities.




Billy continued to talk about his career as a phenomenologist, where he joined the CMS experiment and searched for Higgs boson in simulation, which aims to explain how particles acquire mass. Billy shared an interesting photo of dark matter—The Bullet Cluster. It consists of two colliding galaxy clusters where the mass and visible matter are separated—indicating the unseen presence of dark matter, and its complete difference with visible matter. Since space-time is distorted in the vicinity of massive objects, light bends as it passes near massive objects. If there is a massive celestial body, the observer will see an image that is formed due to the bending of the light. Therefore, we could use the distorted light of surrounding stars to “see” the mass. The research on dark matter and Higgs boson ultimately would tell us the past, present, and future of the universe.


Moving on, Billy shared his experience of transitioning from high school research to college research and emphasized that perseverance, enjoying learning, and life-long learning are crucial.



(Written by 10(5) Aiden   Pictures by Chen Lin, Ma Yanbo   Supervised by Xu Yuechao    Reviewed by Zuo Qian)