Under the sponsorship of the Fundación Premios Rey Jaime I, the Nobel Prizes in Physics Sheldon Lee Glashow and Frank Wilczek will visit the Instituto de Física Corpuscular (IFIC, CSIC - Universitat de València mixed institution) on June 3, during a programmed visit to be part of the Jury for these Awards. The scientists, who established the foundations of the theory describing elementary particles and their interactions, will take part in a round table discussion with researchers, teachers and students.

The American physicists will visit IFIC’s infrastructures from 16:30 p.m. on June 3 , which includes the Sala Blanca (the clean room) where the ATLAS detector’s components for the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) were built, the GRID Computational Center where LHC data is stored, and other experimental laboratories in nuclear physics, neutrino physics and medical physics. At 18:30 they will meet with IFIC researchers and students at a round table to be held at the Auditorium of the University of Valencia’s Scientific Park (‘ Cabecera ’ building ) .

Sheldon Lee Glashow (1932 ) was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1979, sharing the prize with Abdus Salam and Steven Weinberg for their contributions to the electroweak theory, which unifies two of the four fundamental forces in nature. Frank Wilczeck (1951) received the 2004 Nobel Prize in Physics jointly with David Gross and David Politzer for their discoveries regarding the strong interactions between Quarks and Gluons, featuring the ‘asymptotic freedom’ property.

These interactions, along with the elementary constituents’ three families description known to date, form the so-called Standard Model of particle physics, the Physics theory that explains how the universe works at the microscopic level. Being the Higgs boson one of the key pieces that was still missing in this model, it was finally discovered at CERN in 2012.