Physics at the high energy frontier – the Large Hadron Collider project

• Welcome
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• Dr Tara Shears, University of Liverpool, UK
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Tara Shears is a particle physicist and Reader at the University of Liverpool. She started her career investigating the behaviour of fundamental particles and forces at the OPAL experiment at CERN, the European centre for particle physics, and was subsequently awarded a Royal Society University Research Fellowship with the University of Liverpool in 2000 to continue her research at the CDF experiment, at the Fermilab particle physics facility near Chicago, USA. Tara joined the LHCb experiment at CERN's Large Hadron Collider particle accelerator in 2004. This experiment has been designed to investigate differences between matter and antimatter, but is also proving to be an ideal testing ground for the Standard Model of particle physics. Tara currently convenes the LHCb electroweak physics working group, and is testing the behaviour of the electroweak forces at LHC energies. 

• Professor John Ellis FRS, CERN, Switzerland
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• Dr Lyndon Evans CBE FRS, Imperial College London and CERN, Switzerland
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• Dr Steve Myers, CERN, Switzerland
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With 38 years of experience at CERN, and having worked on the major colliders there, Steve Myers is certainly no stranger to CERN’s accelerators.  Belfast born Steve is a graduate of Queen’s University Belfast. He started at CERN in 1972 as Engineer-in-Charge on the operation of the Intersecting Storage Rings Collider (ISR) where he worked for 7 years. From 1979 onwards he spent much of his career working on the Large Electron Positron (LEP). He spent 10 years participating in the design of LEP, then went on to take responsibility for the commissioning. He became Deputy Leader of the SPS-LEP (SL) Division in charge of preparing the LEP Collider for physics in the 1990s. He was Project Leader of the LEP upgrade (LEP2) from 1996 until 2000. In 2000 Myers became Leader of the SPS-LHC (SL) Division, before becoming Head of the Accelerator and Beams (AB) Department in 2003 with the responsibility to design, build and get working the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. In September 2008, Steve Myers was appointed by the CERN Council as Director of Accelerators and Technology effective from January 2009, responsible for all present and future accelerators at CERN (including the LHC and its upgrades) and all engineering technology. 

• Professor Tejinder Virdee, CERN, Switzerland
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Tejinder Virdee is Professor of Physics at Imperial College, London. He did his doctorate studies at Imperial College on an experiment conducted at SLAC, Stanford, USA. In the eighties he worked on an experiment studying deep inelastic Compton scattering of photons off of quarks and then on the UA1 proton-antiproton collider experiment, both at CERN. After UA1 Tejinder concentrated on the physics of, and experimentation at, the next generation of Hadron Colliders. He is one of the founders of the Compact Muon Solenoid Collaboration (CMS) at CERN-LHC. He has played a crucial role in all phases of CMS since its formation in 1992, stretching from concept, prototyping, construction, installation, commissioning and initial data-taking. Tejinder was elected to be Spokesperson of the CMS Collaboration for three years from 2007 to 2009 and was the Deputy Spokesperson during 1993-2006. CMS today comprises over 3000 scientists and engineers from over 180 institutions in 38 countries.  

• Professor Abraham Seiden
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Abraham Seiden is Distinguished Professor of Physics at the University of California Santa Cruz campus.  He was the founding Director of the Santa Cruz Institute for Particle Physics, a position he held for 30 years.  During this time period the institute developed a program in accelerator based particle physics, terrestrial and space based particle astrophysics, theoretical physics, and applications of particle physics instrumentation in neurobiology.  From 2002 to 2007 he was Chair of the P5 Subpanel, the group charged with created a long term plan for particle physics in the United States.  Seiden has also been the manager for a number of major detector construction projects.  He now serves as manager of the U.S. program for upgrading the ATLAS detector at CERN.  He has twice been a year long visitor at CERN. 

• Professor Valerie Gibson, University of Cambridge, UK
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Professor Val Gibson is a founder member of the LHCb experiment and was the UK Spokesperson during its construction and commissioning phase. She gained her DPhil in Experimental Particle Physics from Queen's College Oxford and has previously held a physics fellowship at CERN, a 5 year SERC Advanced Fellowship, the Stokes Senior Research Fellowship at Pembroke College Cambridge and a Leverhulme Royal Society Fellowship. She is currently a Professor of High Energy Physics and a Fellow of Trinity College Cambridge. Her current research interests include the search for new phenomena in quantum loop processes containing b-quarks and precision measurements of CP-violation which holds the key to our understanding of the matter-antimatter imbalance in the Universe. She has published more than 300 papers on aspects of High Energy Physics. She is married with 2 children. 

• Dr Jurgen Schukraft, CERN, Switzerland
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Jurgen Schukraft is a senior researcher at CERN, the European Center for Particle Physics in Geneva, Switzerland. He received his PhD in 1983 from the University of Heidelberg, investigating fission processes in Uranium on Uranium collisions at the heavy ion accelerator at GSI, Darmstadt. He joined CERN as a fellow in 1984 working on hadron production and electromagnetic signals in experiments using both pp reactions (R808 at the CERN ISR) and heavy ion reactions (NA34, NA45 at the CERN SPS and E855 at the BNL AGS accelerators). He is a founding member of the ALICE experiment at the CERN LHC and served as its first Spokesperson from 1992 to 2000. The ALICE collaboration, including some 1000 scientists from over 100 Institutions, will study matter at extreme energy densities (the ‘Quark Gluon Plasma’), which resembles the primordial matter in the early Universe a few microseconds after the Big Bang. He served as member or chair of several working groups set up by international science committees (NuPECC, NSAC, OECD-Megascience) and scientific councils, evaluates grants for national and European research agencies, and is Associate Editor of a physics journal (EPJC). 

• Dr Peter Jenni, CERN, Switzerland
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Peter Jenni, Swiss, born in 1948, obtained his Diploma for Physics at the University of Berne in 1973 and his Doctorate at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zürich (ETHZ) in 1976. Peter Jenni participated in CERN experiments at the Synchro-Cyclotron (SC, 1972/3), at the Proton Synchrotron (PS, 1974/6), and as ETHZ Research Associate at the Intersecting Storage Rings (ISR, 1976/7). During 1978/9, he was a Research Associate at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Centre (SLAC), USA, participating in the MARK II experiment at the e+e– storage ring SPEAR. He became a CERN staff in 1980 with the UA2 experiment at the SPS collider (major involvement in the discoveries of jets and the W/Z bosons). His strong interest was with the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) since the beginning in 1984. From 1991 the main activities concentrated on tasks related to the spokespersonship first of a proto-Collaboration (Expression of Interest, 1992), and then, on the shared spokespersonship with F. Dydak of the ATLAS Collaboration (Letter of Intent 1992, Technical Proposal 1994). In October 1995 he was elected Spokesperson of ATLAS which today comprises some 3000 scientists representing 174 Institutions from 38 countries. He was re-elected several times and retired from this duty in February 2009, retaining a strong involvement in the operation and physics of the experiment. 

• Dr Sergio Cittolin, CERN, Switzerland
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Cittolin Sergio obtained his degree in General Physics in 1967 from the Padova University in Italy. As INFN fellow and University associated professor from 1967 to 1975, he taught general physics and participated to experiments at CERN. In 1975 as CERN staff he developed and implemented software and hardware systems for the trigger and data acquisition in experiments at CERN, contributing to the introduction and exploitation of the emerging microprocessor and personal computers technologies in the domains of the experimental physics. During the period 1978-1989, he was responsible for the design, implementation and operation of the trigger, data acquisition and control systems of the UA1 experiment. From 1994 to 2008 he led the design and construction of the data acquisition and control systems of the CMS experiment running at LHC. 

• Dr Neil Geddes, STFC Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, UK
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• Professor Jos Engelen, Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO), Netherlands
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• Professor Rolf Heuer, CERN, Switzerland
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Professor Rolf-Dieter Heuer was born in Boll/Goeppingen, Germany. He studied physics at the University of Stuttgart where he graduated in 1974, and obtained his PhD at the University of Heidelberg in 1977. Professor Heuer is an experimental particle physicist. Most of his scientific work has been related to the study of electron-positron reactions, development of experimental techniques, as well as construction and running of large detector systems. In 1977 he became research scientist at the University of Heidelberg working for the JADE experiment at the electron-positron storage ring PETRA until 1983, situated at the DESY in Hamburg. From 1984 to 1998, Professor Heuer was a staff member at CERN, European Organization for Nuclear Research, working for the OPAL experiment. He then became the run coordinator during the start-up phase of LEP1 in 1989-1992 and the OPAL spokesperson in 1994-1998. In 1998, Rolf-Dieter Heuer was appointed to a chair at the University of Hamburg (C4 professor). He established a group working on the preparations for experiments at an electron-positron Linear Collider which quickly became one of the leading groups in this area world wide. Since December 2004, Professor Heuer was research director for particle and astroparticle physics at the DESY laboratory, a member of the Helmholtz association. In December 2007 Professor Heuer was elected Director General of CERN taking office January 2009. 

• Professor Sir Chris Llewellyn Smith FRS, University of Oxford, UK
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Chris Llewellyn Smith is a theoretical physicist.  He is currently President of the Council of SESAME (Synchrotron-light for Experimental Science and its Applications in the Middle East) and a Visiting Professor in Oxford, where he works on future energy supply and demand.  He was Chair of the Council of ITER (2007-09); Director of UKAEA Culham (2003-08), where he was responsible for the UK's fusion programme and the operation of JET, and developed and promoted the ‘Fast Track’ development of fusion energy; Provost and President of University College London (1999-2002); Director General of CERN (1994–98), when the LHC was approved and LEP successfully upgraded; and Chairman of Oxford Physics (1987-92).  He has written and spoken widely on science funding, international scientific collaboration and energy issues.  His scientific contributions and leadership have been recognised by awards and honours in seven countries on three continents.