05/19/2026
Astronomy on Tap 6pm | May 19th with Dr. Sally Seidel
Talk Title: “Discovering New Particles” Sharing the motivation for and excitement of searching for new fundamental particles in the Universe!
Sally Seidel received her Ph.D. in experimental particle physics from the University of Michigan on a search for nucleon decay using the IMB water Cherenkov detector. As a postdoctoral fellow with the University of Toronto on the ARGUS Experiment, she participated in the development of a novel drift chamber and published a study of charmed baryon decay. Seidel joined the University of New Mexico faculty in 1991. On the CDF experiment at Fermilab, she co-led the upgrade silicon tracker sensor design team and carried out a study of multi-jet final states. Since 1995 she has been a member of the ATLAS experiment at the LHC where her contributions include development of new particle tracking technologies and the search for New Physics with heavy quark signatures. On ATLAS she has co-led the pixel sensor group and developed a program for evaluating the radiation hardness of proposed new technologies for the LHC detectors. In 2014 her team discovered the new particle called the Bc(2S). Seidel’s work has been supported by the U.S. Department of Energy, the National Science Foundation, NASA, the Fulbright Foundation, the Vietnam Education Foundation, Sandia National Laboratories, the European Commission, the University of New Mexico, and the Universities Research Association. She has served as co-director of the Los Alamos Summer School in Physics, as chair of the DOE High Energy Physics Advisory Panel, and as a member of the Fermi Research Alliance Board of Directors.
She has served on the American Physical Society (APS) Committee on International Freedom of Scientists and the Fermilab, LANSCE/Los Alamos, and US-LHC Users Executive Committees, as well as the APS Topical Group on Hadronic Physics, the APS Four Corners Section Executive Committee, and the Executive Committee of the APS Division of Particles and Fields.
