WYOMISSING, Pa. — The 11th annual Penn State Berks Losoncy Lecture in Physics and Astronomy will be presented by Andreas Metz, professor of physics at Temple University and Fellow of the American Physical Society. 
 
Metz will present “Understanding the mass of everyday objects from the perspective of particle physics” on Wednesday, March 27. A reception will begin at 4 p.m. in the college’s Freyberger Gallery and the lecture begins at 4:30 p.m. in the Perkins Student Center Auditorium. This event is free and open to the public. 
 
The lecture series is named in honor of George J. Losoncy, a retired Penn State Berks maintenance employee who donated $50,000 to establish a research endowment in physics and astronomy at Penn State Berks. 
 
According to Metz: After more than one century of experimental and theoretical research, the so-called Standard Model (SM) of particle physics became complete with the discovery of the Higgs particle in 2012. The SM describes elementary particles (particles without substructure) and the forces between those particles. While the mass of the SM particles is closely related to the Higgs particle, the mass of everyday macroscopic objects, such as a pencil, is largely of a different origin. This presentation will explain how the mass of everyday objects can be understood in modern particle physics, and will also touch on open questions in this field. In addition, this presentation will also briefly highlight the electron-ion collider, a future particle accelerator to be built at Brookhaven National Lab, which can further this research area.  
 
Metz’s main areas of research include physics of the strong interaction, phenomenology of hard lepton- and hadron-induced scattering processes, QCD factorization, higher twist effects, parton correlation functions and their universality properties, quark- and gluon-structure of hadrons, spin structure of the nucleon, and multi-dimensional imaging of strongly interacting systems.  

For more information, contact Alexei Prokudin, professor of physics, at 610-396-6160 or via email at prokudin@psu.edu.