SIF Fermi Prize for decisive contribution to LHC discoveries
The 2013 Enrico Fermi Prize of the Italian Physical Society [SIF] has been awarded to (alphabetic order):
- Pierluigi Campana (INFN Laboratori Nazionali di Frascati),
- Simone Giani (CERN),
- Fabiola Gianotti (CERN),
- Paolo Giubellino (INFN Torino)
- Guido Tonelli (Università di Pisa and INFN Pisa),
“for the outstanding results that the five large international collaboration experiments at the CERN Large Hadron Collider [LHC] – LHCb, TOTEM, ATLAS, ALICE, CMS – have achieved during the first period of LHC data taking under the successful guidance of the awardees as spokespersons”.
Since 2001, the SIF awards yearly the Fermi prize among its members who honour physics with their outstanding discoveries. The five laureates have been the experiments’ spokespersons during the difficult and exciting initial stage of data taking and analysis at the LHC, which has led the CERN international collaborations to such high scientific success.
The LHC is the world’s largest and most powerful particle accelerator. It consists of a 27km ring of superconducting magnets with a number of accelerating structures to boost the energy of the particles along the way, producing collisions between counter-circulating beams of particles at unprecedented energies and luminosities. Its main objective is to allow physicists to test the predictions of the Standard Model and to search for novel phenomena not predicted by the present theory.
The five large international collaboration LHC experiments were designed and built by physicists and engineers from all over the world with support by the Research Agencies and Governments of their countries.
ATLAS and CMS are the largest general purpose LHC experiments. They were mainly planned to search for the long-sought Higgs boson. Both experiments reached an important milestone in July 2012 when they reported on the discovery of a Higgs Boson. For this achievement, the ATLAS and CMS collaboration were also recently awarded the 2013 EPS High Energy and Particle Physics Division prize.
Among the highlights of the other three large international experiments at LHC, are the first ever observation of CP symmetry violation in Bs meson decays by the LHCb experiment, the unveiling of new features of the hottest and densest state of matter ever produced in high energy nucleus-nucleus collisions by the ALICE experiment and the first direct confirmation that the proton continues to become larger with energy according to the TOTEM experiment results.
The Enrico Fermi prize will be awarded during the Opening Ceremony of the 99th SIF National Congress at Trieste, Italy, on 23 September.
For more information, visit the Enrico Fermi Prize website.
