I am a physicist, now retired but still active with the CMS experiment (CMS Emeritus). As an experimental particle physicist, I have participated in a number of experiments aimed at understanding the structure of matter and the nature of the interactions between its fundamental constituents. Since the 1980’s I have worked on the development and construction of calorimeters used to identify electrons, positrons, and photons produced in high energy collisions. I had the pleasure to lead teams on two of these experiments. Since 1995, I have shared in the effort to build the CMS experiment for the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN. The LHC allows us to recreate the conditions which existed in the universe only a fraction of a billionth of a second after the Big-Bang. This has permitted the recent discovery* of a Higgs boson by both the ATLAS and CMS experiments (CERN press conference on July 4th, 2012), for more details see :
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/338/6114/1558.full.
*This discovery was rewarded in 2013 by the European Physical Society's prestigious High Energy and Particle Physics Prize, awarded jointly to the ATLAS and CMS collaborations, and to the physicists Michel Della Negra, Peter Jenni, and Tejinder Virdee for their pioneering and outstanding leadership roles in the making of the ATLAS and CMS experiments.
The Nobel Prize in Physics 2013 was awarded jointly to François Englert and Peter W. Higgs "for the theoretical discovery of a mechanism that contributes to our understanding of the origin of mass of subatomic particles, and which recently was confirmed through the discovery of the predicted fundamental particle, by the ATLAS and CMS experiments at CERN's Large Hadron Collider".
Read the press release :
http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/2013/press.html
Some links:
LHC
CERN
CMS Experiment
CEA Saclay
CEA - DSM
