Michel Della Negra, born 1942, is a French experimental particle physicist known for his role in the 2012 discovery of the

Higgs Boson The Higgs boson, sometimes called the Higgs particle, is an elementary particle in the Standard Model of particle physics produced by the quantum excitation of the Higgs field, one of the fields in particle physics theory. In the Stand ...

Career

Della Negra studied mathematics and theoretical physics for his doctorate at the Laboratory of Nuclear Physics of the

College de France A college (Latin: ''collegium'') is an educational institution or a constituent part of one. A college may be a degree-awarding tertiary educational institution, a part of a collegiate or federal university, an institution offering v ...

Paris Paris () is the capital and most populous city of France, with an estimated population of 2,165,423 residents in 2019 in an area of more than 105 km² (41 sq mi), making it the 30th most densely populated city in the world in 2020. S ...

, defending his thesis on the experimental study of proton-antiproton annihilation in 1967. In the 1970s, following post-doctoral work at the

Stanford Linear Accelerator Center SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, originally named the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, is a United States Department of Energy National Laboratory operated by Stanford University under the programmatic direction of the U.S. Departme ...

(SLAC) in

Palo Alto, California Palo Alto (; Spanish language, Spanish for "tall stick") is a charter city in the northwestern corner of Santa Clara County, California, United States, in the San Francisco Bay Area, named after a Sequoia sempervirens, coastal redwood tree kno ...

, he involved himself on high-energy physics projects at

CERN The European Organization for Nuclear Research, known as CERN (; ; ), is an intergovernmental organization that operates the largest particle physics laboratory in the world. Established in 1954, it is based in a northwestern suburb of Gene ...

Geneva, Switzerland Geneva ( ; french: Genève ) frp, Genèva ; german: link=no, Genf ; it, Ginevra ; rm, Genevra is the List of cities in Switzerland, second-most populous city in Switzerland (after Zürich) and the most populous city of Romandy, the French-speaki ...

, where he worked initially as a member of the

Intersecting Storage Rings The ISR (standing for "Intersecting Storage Rings") was a particle accelerator at CERN. It was the world's first hadron collider, and ran from 1971 to 1984, with a maximum center of mass energy of 62 GeV. From its initial startup, the collider ...

group. In 1977 joined the team led by

Carlo Rubbia Carlo Rubbia (born 31 March 1934) is an Italian particle physicist and inventor who shared the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1984 with Simon van der Meer for work leading to the discovery of the W and Z particles at CERN. Early life and education ...

and played an important role in the 1981 discovery of the W and

Z boson In particle physics, the W and Z bosons are vector bosons that are together known as the weak bosons or more generally as the intermediate vector bosons. These elementary particles mediate the weak interaction; the respective symbols are , , and ...

s. Della Nigra and his colleague from

Imperial College London Imperial College London (legally Imperial College of Science, Technology and Medicine) is a public research university in London, United Kingdom. Its history began with Prince Albert, consort of Queen Victoria, who developed his vision for a cu ...

, Tejinder Singh Virdee, were among the first to envisage a

hermetic detector In particle physics, a hermetic detector (also called a 4π detector) is a particle detector designed to observe all possible decay products of an interaction between subatomic particles in a collider by covering as large an area around the inte ...

for the

large hadron collider The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is the world's largest and highest-energy particle collider. It was built by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) between 1998 and 2008 in collaboration with over 10,000 scientists and hundred ...

(LHC) based on a strong magnetic field, the

compact muon solenoid The Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiment is one of two large general-purpose particle physics detectors built on the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN in Switzerland and France. The goal of the CMS experiment is to investigate a wide range ...

(CMS), and was spokesman for the CMS from 1992 until 2006. Together with evidence from the A Toroidal LHC Apparatus (ATLAS), the CMS experiments were crucial to the discovery of the

in 2012. As of 2018 he is physicist emeritus of the physics department of CERN, and CMS emeritus at

Awards

Della Negra shared the 2013 Special

Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics The Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics is one of the Breakthrough Prizes, awarded by the Breakthrough Prize Board. Initially named Fundamental Physics Prize, it was founded in July 2012 by Russia-born Israeli entrepreneur, venture capita ...

for the discovery of the

with his pioneering colleagues

Fabiola Gianotti Fabiola Gianotti (; born 29 October 1960) is an Italian experimental particle physicist who is the current and first woman Director-General at CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research) in Switzerland. Her first mandate began on 1 Janua ...

and

Peter Jenni Peter Jenni, (born 17 April 1948) is an experimental particle physicist working at CERN. He is best known as one of the "founding fathers" of the ATLAS experiment at the CERN Large Hadron Collider together with a few other colleagues. He acted ...

from ATLAS, Tejinder Singh Virdee,

Guido Tonelli Guido Tonelli (born 1950) is an Italian particle physicist who was involved with the discovery of the Higgs boson at the Large Hadron Collider. He is a professor of General Physics at the University of Pisa (Italy) and a CERN visiting scientist ...

, and

Joe Incandela Joseph Incandela is an American particle physicist, a professor of physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara and currently based at CERN, where he spent two years as the spokesperson for the Compact Muon Solenoid experiment at the Lar ...

from CMS, and LHC project leader

Lyn Evans Lyn Evans CBE (born Lyndon Rees Evans in 1945), is a Welsh scientist who served as the project leader of the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland. Based at CERN, in 2012 he became the director of the Linear Collider Collaboration, an internatio ...

. He also shared the 2012

Julius Wess Julius Erich Wess (5 December 19348 August 2007) was an Austrian theoretical physicist noted as the co-inventor of the Wess–Zumino model and Wess–Zumino–Witten model in the field of supersymmetry and conformal field theory. He was also a ...

Prize from the

Karlsruher Institut für Technologie The Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT; german: Karlsruher Institut für Technologie) is a public university, public research university in Karlsruhe, Germany. The institute is a national research center of the Helmholtz Association. KIT wa ...

with Jenni, and the 2013

High Energy and Particle Physics Prize The High Energy and Particle Physics Prize, established in 1989, is awarded every two years by the European Physical Society (EPS) for an outstanding contribution to high energy and particle physics. :) Enjoy Recipients Source: * 1989 Georges Ch ...

of the

European Physical Society The European Physical Society (EPS) is a non-profit organisation whose purpose is to promote physics and physicists in Europe through methods such as physics outreach. Formally established in 1968, its membership includes the national physical so ...

with Jenni, Virdee, and the CMS and Atlas consortia. In 2014 he won the Prix André Lagarrigue of the

University of Paris-Sud Paris-Sud University (French: ''Université Paris-Sud''), also known as University of Paris — XI (or as Université d'Orsay before 1971), was a French research university distributed among several campuses in the southern suburbs of Paris, in ...

for his "exceptional quality in building experimental devices of great complexity, with a profound understanding of physics". In 2017 he shared the

Panofsky Prize The Panofsky Prize in Experimental Particle Physics is an annual prize of the American Physical Society. It is given to recognize and encourage outstanding achievements in experimental particle physics, and is open to scientists of any nation. It w ...

in experimental particle physics with Jenni and Virdee.

References

20th-century French physicists 21st-century French physicists Collège de France alumni 1942 births Living people Winners of the Panofsky Prize People associated with CERN {{France-scientist-stub