IIHE and the Nobel Prize in Physics

Meet the IIHE physicists

The work behind the Nobel Prize has involved the contributions of thousands of physicists from across the world for nearly fifty years. The people who contributed to the discovery include the theorists who predicted the mechanism, the physicists and engineers who designed, manufactured and maintained the accelerators and detectors, and the physicsts who analysed the data. The IIHE is proud to be a strong contributor in the discovery of the boson.

Abdollah Mohammadi, Post-doc

I come from Iran, and I have been a post-doc at the IIHE for more than one year. I am working on the study of the Brout-Englert-Higgs boson that was discovered by the CMS and ATLAS collaborations at CERN in July 2012. The BEH boson has a very short lifetime and decays nearly instantaneously. The physicists in the CMS and ATLAS collaborations analyse all the possible final states. I am personally involved in the study of the BEH boson decaying into two leptons. This channel is particularly relevant to test the Standard Model.

Cécile Caillol, PhD student

I am a PhD student at the IIHE. I am also working on the study of the Brout-Englert-Higgs boson decaying into a pair of tau leptons. I participated to the analysis of the data recorded in CMS in the year 2012. The tau lepton is a sort of heavy electron. It has itself a short lifetime and decays in other particles. It is then a particularly complex object to identify in the CMS detector. I am also measuring how efficiently the tau leptons are identified by the CMS detector.

Jian Wang, Post-doc

I am a post-doc researcher at the IIHE and I come from China. I am searching for new, massive particles similar to the Brout-Englert-Higgs boson. The BEH boson has very special properties in the Standard Model of particle physics, and it would be somewhat surprising if it were the only particle that shows such properties. Also, the BEH boson could interact with dark matter, which seems to compose 80% of the matter of the universe. I'm searching for indications of such an interaction.

Luca Pernie, PhD student

I am a PhD student at the IIHE and I come from Rome. The subject of my PhD thesis is the measurement of the production of pairs of Z bosons with the CMS detector. Pairs of Z bosons can be produced either in the decay of a Brout-Englert-Higgs boson or in other rare processes. Understanding the production of pairs of Z bosons is therefore very important. My work is a test of the consistency of the standard model at energy scales that can be observed for the first time at the LHC.