Over the past 70 years, CERN’s accelerators and experiments have delivered some remarkable results and discoveries, owing to the efforts of generations of physicists. We asked seven of the new generation — all CERN Fellows, in the early stages of their career — to tell us about some of the milestone achievements in the history of their laboratory.
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Authors and Affiliations
Contributions
Federica Riti is a CERN Fellow working on the CMS experiment. She obtained her PhD at ETH Zurich, working on lepton flavour universality. Recently, her research has concentrated on investigating rare b-hadron decays to search indirectly for physics beyond the standard model, as well as updating the CMS trigger system for the high-luminosity phase of the LHC.
Philipp Gadow is a CERN Fellow working on the ATLAS experiment. He obtained his PhD at Technical University of Munich and worked as a postdoctoral researcher at DESY, Hamburg. His current research focuses on searches for new particles in rare and complex final states with top quarks with ATLAS, developing machine-learning algorithms for the identification of heavy-flavour jets and silicon detector R&D for future collider facilities.
David Walter is a CERN Fellow working on the CMS experiment. He obtained his PhD at DESY, Hamburg, for his work on top quark physics and luminosity measurements using Z bosons. Currently, he is working on the first CMS measurement of the W boson mass. In the near future, he will focus further on precision measurements of W and Z bosons.
María Vieites Díaz is a CERN Fellow working on the LHCb experiment. She obtained her PhD in 2019 from Universidade de Santiago de Compostela and subsequently worked as a postdoctoral researcher at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne and at CERN. Her research focuses on searches in flavour physics for phenomena beyond the standard model, using amplitude analyses of B-meson decays. She is currently working on the measurement of the photon polarization parameter, an observable sensitive to right-handed currents.
Barbara Maria Latacz is a CERN Fellow working in the BASE Collaboration on ultra-precise measurements of the fundamental properties of the antiproton. She obtained her PhD at the University Paris-Saclay on the study of the formation of antihydrogen ions. She joined BASE as a postdoctoral researcher in RIKEN, and has recently focused on developing coherent spectroscopy for measurements of the nuclear magnetic moments of the proton and antiproton. Next, she will take up a position as a Research Scientist at CERN.
Luigi Dello Stritto is a CERN Fellow working on the ALICE experiment. He did his PhD at the Physics Department of the University of Salerno, where he also worked as a postdoctoral researcher before joining CERN. His research focuses on heavy-flavour and jet physics in ultra-relativistic proton–proton and heavy-ion collisions, aiming to unveil the properties of the strong interaction.
Petar Bokan is a CERN Fellow working on the ATLAS experiment. He received his PhD from Uppsala University and the University of Goettingen in 2020. His research focuses on studying the interactions of the Higgs boson, including its self-interaction, which is a crucial test of the standard model and the mechanism of electroweak symmetry breaking. He is also involved in the upgrade and operations of the ATLAS detector.
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Riti, F., Gadow, P., Walter, D. et al. A history of CERN in seven physics milestones. Nat Rev Phys 6, 582–586 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s42254-024-00762-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s42254-024-00762-9
