Antonella De Santo | |
|---|---|
 Professor Antonella De Santo at CERN in 2019 | |
| Alma mater | University of Pisa |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Particle Physics [1] |
| Institutions | CERN University of Oxford |
Antonella De Santo is an Italian and British Professor of Experimental Physics and works on the ATLAS experiment. She was the first woman in the Department of Physics at the University of Sussex to be made a professor.
De Santo graduated cum laude from the University of Pisa in 1993. [2] She remained there for her graduate studies, earning her PhD in 1997. [2] Whilst she was a PhD student she witnessed the discovery of neutrino oscillations. [3]
De Santo was awarded a research fellowship in the experimental physics division of CERN. She joined the University of Oxford, working with Alfons Weber, as a postdoctoral research fellow in 2000. [2] [4] At Oxford, De Santo studied neutrino physics. [5] In 2003 De Santo joined Royal Holloway, University of London as a lecturer. [2] She was coordinator for the ATLAS experiment-UK supersymmetry group and led the working group looking for three leptons in the excited state. [6] [7]
She was appointed an associate professor at the University of Sussex in 2009. [2] She founded the Sussex team working on the Large Hadron Collider. [2] She is searching for evidence of supersymmetry in proton-proton interactions. [8] She is interested in luminosity upgrades at the ATLAS experiment. [9]
In 2013 she became the University of Sussex's first woman professor in the department of physics. [10] She was the Head of Experimental Particle Physics at the University of Sussex between 2011 and 2017. She was awarded a Science and Technology Facilities Council consolidator grant in 2012 and 2015 that allowed her to work on the ATLAS experiment. [8] She teaches the advanced particle physics course. [11] In 2016 she arranged the annual meeting of the Institute of Physics High Energy Particle Physics group at the University of Sussex. [12]
In 2017 she was awarded a Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award allowing her to search for physics beyond the Standard Model. [2] [13] She was a member of the ATLAS experiment Speakers Committee and of the ATLAS Publication Committee. [2]
De Santo launched the annual University of Sussex particle physics masterclasses for school students. [2] [14] She has presented her work at several Royal Society Summer Exhibitions. The Sussex SUSY Softies, a series of knitted particles that explained the main features of neutralinos, were one of the most popular aspects of the 2014 exhibition. [15] Between 2017 and 2020, she was a governor of Cardinal Newman Catholic School, Hove. [16] She collaborated with the artists Joe Gerhardt and Ruth Jarman to create a work of art, HALO, that incorporated the results of CERN's particle collisions. [17] It was commissioned by Audemars Piguet for Art Basel. [17]
In particle physics, an elementary particle or fundamental particle is a subatomic particle that is not composed of other particles. Particles currently thought to be elementary include electrons, the fundamental fermions, as well as the fundamental bosons, which generally are force particles that mediate interactions among fermions. A particle containing two or more elementary particles is a composite particle.
Particle physics or high energy physics is the study of fundamental particles and forces that constitute matter and radiation. The fundamental particles in the universe are classified in the Standard Model as fermions and bosons. There are three generations of fermions, but ordinary matter is made only from the first fermion generation. The first generation consists of up and down quarks which form protons and neutrons, and electrons and electron neutrinos. The three fundamental interactions known to be mediated by bosons are electromagnetism, the weak interaction, and the strong interaction.
The Standard Model of particle physics is the theory describing three of the four known fundamental forces excluding gravity in the universe and classifying all known elementary particles. It was developed in stages throughout the latter half of the 20th century, through the work of many scientists worldwide, with the current formulation being finalized in the mid-1970s upon experimental confirmation of the existence of quarks. Since then, proof of the top quark (1995), the tau neutrino (2000), and the Higgs boson (2012) have added further credence to the Standard Model. In addition, the Standard Model has predicted various properties of weak neutral currents and the W and Z bosons with great accuracy.
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
W+
,
W−
, and
Z0
. The
W±
bosons have either a positive or negative electric charge of 1 elementary charge and are each other's antiparticles. The
Z0
boson is electrically neutral and is its own antiparticle. The three particles each have a spin of 1. The
W±
bosons have a magnetic moment, but the
Z0
has none. All three of these particles are very short-lived, with a half-life of about 3×10−25 s. Their experimental discovery was pivotal in establishing what is now called the Standard Model of particle physics.
ATLAS is the largest general-purpose particle detector experiment at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), a particle accelerator at CERN in Switzerland. The experiment is designed to take advantage of the unprecedented energy available at the LHC and observe phenomena that involve highly massive particles which were not observable using earlier lower-energy accelerators. ATLAS was one of the two LHC experiments involved in the discovery of the Higgs boson in July 2012. It was also designed to search for evidence of theories of particle physics beyond the Standard Model.
Jonathan Richard Ellis is a British theoretical physicist who is currently Clerk Maxwell Professor of Theoretical Physics at King's College London.
Physics beyond the Standard Model (BSM) refers to the theoretical developments needed to explain the deficiencies of the Standard Model, such as the inability to explain the fundamental parameters of the standard model, the strong CP problem, neutrino oscillations, matter–antimatter asymmetry, and the nature of dark matter and dark energy. Another problem lies within the mathematical framework of the Standard Model itself: the Standard Model is inconsistent with that of general relativity, and one or both theories break down under certain conditions, such as spacetime singularities like the Big Bang and black hole event horizons.
The timeline of particle physics lists the sequence of particle physics theories and discoveries in chronological order. The most modern developments follow the scientific development of the discipline of particle physics.
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 Standard Model, the Higgs particle is a massive scalar boson with zero spin, even (positive) parity, no electric charge, and no colour charge, that couples to mass. It is also very unstable, decaying into other particles almost immediately.
Fabiola Gianotti is an Italian experimental particle physicist who is the current and first woman Director-General at CERN in Switzerland. Her first mandate began on 1 January 2016 and ran for a period of five years. At its 195th Session in 2019, the CERN Council selected Gianotti for a second term as Director-General. Her second five-year term began on 1 January 2021 and goes on until 2025. This is the first time in CERN's history that a Director-General has been appointed for a full second term.
Guido Tonelli 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.
David George Charlton is Professor of Particle Physics in the School of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Birmingham, UK. From 2013 to 2017, he served as Spokesperson of the ATLAS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. Prior to becoming Spokesperson, he was Deputy Spokesperson for four years, and before that Physics Coordinator of ATLAS in the run-up to the start of collision data-taking.
Sau Lan Wu is a Chinese American particle physicist and the Enrico Fermi Distinguished Professor of Physics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She made important contributions towards the discovery of the J/psi particle, which provided experimental evidence for the existence of the charm quark, and the gluon, the vector boson of the strong force in the Standard Model of physics. Recently, her team located at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), using data collected at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), was part of the international effort in the discovery of a boson consistent with the Higgs boson.
Peter Jenni, 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 as spokesperson of the ATLAS Collaboration until 2009. ATLAS is a world-wide collaboration which started in 1992 involving roughly 3,000 physicists at 183 institutions in 38 countries. Jenni was directly involved in the experimental work leading to the discoveries of the W and Z bosons in the 1980s and the Higgs boson in 2012. He is (co-)author of about 1000 publications in scientific journals.
Mayda Velasco is a physicist and professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Northwestern University. She works in experimental particle physics and is a leading member of the CMS Collaboration at the CERN LHC. She founded COFI and is its first director. She is a pioneer in the physics potential of photon colliders.
Jonathan Mark Butterworth is a Professor of Physics at University College London (UCL) working on the ATLAS experiment at CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC). His popular science book Smashing Physics, which tells the story of the search for the Higgs boson, was published in 2014 and his newspaper column / blog Life and Physics is published by The Guardian.
Victoria Jane Martin is a Scottish physicist who is Professor of Collider Physics at the University of Edinburgh. She works on the ATLAS experiment on the Higgs boson.
Sinéad Farrington is a British particle physicist who works on the ATLAS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider.
Kamal Benslama is a Moroccan-Swiss Experimental Particle Physicist and a Visiting Professor at Loyola University Maryland. He worked on the ATLAS experiment, at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN in Switzerland, which is considered as the largest experiment in the history of physical science.
Oliver Buchmueller is a scientist and professor of physics at the Faculty of Natural Science, Imperial College London. Buchmueller is presently serving as one of the lead scientists on the Compact Muon Solenoid experiment at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider, the principal investigator of the Atom Interferometer Observatory and Network and also one of the lead authors at Atomic Experiment for Dark Matter and Gravity Exploration in Space (AEDGE). Previously he has been associated with ALPEH experiment at CERN’s LEP collider and the BaBar experiment at SLAC. Buchmueller was among the group of scientists responsible for the discovery of Higgs Boson particle at the LHC, CERN and later in the scientific exploration to find the traces of dark matter through the LHC.
