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The next to last talk is by Maher J Schroff from the Department of Physics and Astronomy. Maher's presentation is titled Peeking Into Nature's Pool Game.

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Let's imagine playing pool. But this time, let's imagine playing against a professional player. It's their turn to strike the cue ball. And as professionals do, they seem to have accounted for all the physics that's required to drive the ball into the pocket. They've accounted for the angle of incidents, the spin to apply on the ball and the force that's needed to strike the cue ball with all of these intuitive and maybe not so intuitive calculations are based on the laws of physics as we know them. But what if our understanding for physics was incomplete? What if there was an extra force acting on the ball causing it to deviate from its path, possibly missing the pocket, very frustrating for a pool player, but at the same time, very exciting for a physicist in the macroscopic world. Classical physics works to a marvelous precision that we use in our everyday lives based on classical physics alone, we send people to the moon. But in the nanos scopic world at the level of which individual particles are studied. We find gaps in our understanding. We know that the model is incomplete. The standard model of particle physics. Our current rulebook very accurately describes the existence of several particles which have since been discovered but still fails to answer some key questions. My phd research aims to explore these gaps to probe areas where we can potentially see the standard model failing and therefore search for physics beyond the Standard Model and now back to the pool table. But this time, the Nanos scopic one at the large hydro collider at CERN located between France and Switzerland, several pool like balls called protons are accelerated in a circular rink and collided against each other. Just like the professional pool player. We can calculate the angle of scattering given the laws of the Standard Model. But what we're doing now is we're colliding the balls several times to see whether or not they enter the pocket every single time using camera like detectors, we can track the output of the collisions and we can study their scattering angle. And if there is a deviation from what we expect or what the Standard Model tells us, we should expect we can use model extensions to help explain this difference. So what's the use of all this? You may ask? Well, the benefit to anyone who enjoys a game of pool is rather obvious. But as humanity advances to technologies based on the Nanos scopic world, our understanding of the laws that govern such a world are paramount. This knowledge acts as a catalyst for medical technologies as well as computing innovations. As has been the case in the past, it is a catalyst to ensure that the systems we develop based on these new technologies are as reliable as a well aimed shot destined for the pool pocket. Thank you.