Ursula Rita Bassler | |
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| Born | 1965 |
| Alma mater | Pierre and Marie Curie University (Ph.D. particle physics) |
| Scientific career | |
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Ursula Rita Bassler (born 1965) is a French-German particle physicist. Bassler was the President of the CERN Council from 2019 to 2021, [1] and deputy director of National Institute of Nuclear and Particle Physics (IN2P3), CNRS, from 2014 to 2015.
Bassler was born in Germany in 1965. She moved to France as an au-pair. [2] She completed her PhD in particle physics at the Pierre and Marie Curie University in 1993. [3]
She joined the Nuclear and High Energy Laboratory (LPNHE), a joint research unit between the Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS) and Pierre and Marie Curie University, where she worked on collider-based particle physics. [4] Bassler used data from the HERA particle accelerator, where she worked on the structure of the proton as a member of the H1 experiment at DESY in Germany. [3] [5]
In 1998 Bassler joined the DØ experiment at Fermilab, [3] [6] where her responsibility was to run the online calorimeter calibration. [7] [8] She was part of a working group on structure function providing input to the Deep Inelastic Scattering Workshop in 1999. [9]
During the World Year of Physics in 2005, Bassler kept a blog at Quantum Diaries. [10] In 2006, she created the project Collisions, a multi-media project with Anaïs Prosaïc as director, which featured the physicists and engineers who work for the Large Hadron Collider. Bassler and Prosaïc made the documentary Collisions in 2008. [11]
In 2007 she was made Head of the Particle Physics division at the Institute of Research of the Fundamental Laws of the Universe at the French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission (CEA). [3] [12]
She was scientific deputy director in particle physics and computing at IN2P3 (2014-2015), before becoming its deputy director (2016-2018). [4] At IN2P3, Bassler prepared the approval of the upgrades for the high-luminosity LHC (HL-LHC) detectors and the French participation in the European Open Science Cloud. [3]
She has been member of the DESY scientific council. [3]
In September 2018 Bassler was made the 23rd President of CERN Council. Her candidacy was proposed by France and Germany. [13]
As of August 2024, Bassler is affiliated with Laboratoire Leprince-Ringuet at École Polytechnique as CNRS researcher.
Bassler has published more than 500 peer reviewed papers [14] and she is editor of the popular science book Étonnants infinis. [15]
A barn is a metric unit of area equal to 10−28 m2 (100 fm2). Originally used in nuclear physics for expressing the cross sectional area of nuclei and nuclear reactions, today it is also used in all fields of high-energy physics to express the cross sections of any scattering process, and is best understood as a measure of the probability of interaction between small particles. A barn is approximately the cross-sectional area of a uranium nucleus. The barn is also the unit of area used in nuclear quadrupole resonance and nuclear magnetic resonance to quantify the interaction of a nucleus with an electric field gradient. While the barn never was an SI unit, the SI standards body acknowledged it in the 8th SI Brochure due to its use in particle physics.
The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is the world's largest and highest-energy particle accelerator. It was built by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) between 1998 and 2008 in collaboration with over 10,000 scientists and hundreds of universities and laboratories across more than 100 countries. It lies in a tunnel 27 kilometres (17 mi) in circumference and as deep as 175 metres (574 ft) beneath the France–Switzerland border near Geneva.
H1 was a particle detector operated at the HERA collider at the German national laboratory DESY in Hamburg. The first studies for the H1 experiment were proposed in 1981. The H1 detector began operating together with HERA in 1992 and took data until 2007. It consisted of several different detector components, measured about 12 m × 15 m × 10 m and weighed 2800 tons. It was one of four detectors along the HERA accelerator.
The Large Electron–Positron Collider (LEP) was one of the largest particle accelerators ever constructed. It was built at CERN, a multi-national centre for research in nuclear and particle physics near Geneva, Switzerland.
HERA was a particle accelerator at DESY in Hamburg. It was operated from 1992 to 30 June 2007. At HERA, electrons or positrons were brought to collision with protons at a center-of-mass energy of 320 GeV. HERA was used mainly to study the structure of protons and the properties of quarks, laying the foundation for much of the science done at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at the CERN particle physics laboratory today. HERA is the only lepton–proton collider in the world to date and was on the energy frontier in certain regions of the kinematic range.
DELPHI was one of the four main detectors of the Large Electron–Positron Collider (LEP) at CERN, one of the largest particle accelerators ever made. Like the other three detectors, it recorded and analyzed the result of the collision between LEP's colliding particle beams. The specific focus of DELPHI was on particle identification, three-dimensional information, high granularity (detail), and precise vertex determination.
ZEUS was a particle detector at the HERA particle accelerator at the German national laboratory DESY in Hamburg. It began taking data in 1992 and was operated until HERA was decommissioned in June 2007. The scientific collaboration behind ZEUS consisted of about 400 physicists and technicians from 56 institutes in 17 countries.
Joseph Johannus Engelen, a Dutch physicist, was Chairman of the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) from January 2009 to October 2016.
ALEPH was a particle detector at the Large Electron-Positron collider (LEP) at CERN. It was designed to explore the physics predicted by the Standard Model and to search for physics beyond it.
The safety of high energy particle collisions was a topic of widespread discussion and topical interest during the time when the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) and later the Large Hadron Collider (LHC)—currently the world's largest and most powerful particle accelerator—were being constructed and commissioned. Concerns arose that such high energy experiments—designed to produce novel particles and forms of matter—had the potential to create harmful states of matter or even doomsday scenarios. Claims escalated as commissioning of the LHC drew closer, around 2008–2010. The claimed dangers included the production of stable micro black holes and the creation of hypothetical particles called strangelets, and these questions were explored in the media, on the Internet and at times through the courts.
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.
Sir Tejinder Singh Virdee,, is a Kenyan-born British experimental particle physicist and Professor of Physics at Imperial College London. He is best known for originating the concept of the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) with a few other colleagues and has been referred to as one of the 'founding fathers' of the project. CMS is a world-wide collaboration which started in 1991 and now has over 3500 participants from 50 countries.
The Future Circular Collider (FCC) is a proposed particle accelerator with an energy significantly above that of previous circular colliders, such as the Super Proton Synchrotron, the Tevatron, and the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). The FCC project is considering three scenarios for collision types: FCC-hh, for hadron-hadron collisions, including proton-proton and heavy ion collisions, FCC-ee, for electron-positron collisions, and FCC-eh, for electron-hadron collisions.
Maria Fidecaro (1930-2023), née Cervasi, was an Italian experimental physicist with a focus on particle physics. She has spent most of her career at CERN, where she after retirement had the status of honorary member of the personnel.
Amanda Margaret Cooper-Sarkar is an English particle physicist. She is an expert on deep inelastic scattering and parton distribution functions.
FASER is one of the nine particle physics experiments in 2022 at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. It is designed to both search for new light and weakly coupled elementary particles, and to detect and study the interactions of high-energy collider neutrinos. In 2023, FASER and SND@LHC reported the first observation of collider neutrinos.
The Scattering and Neutrino Detector (SND) at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), CERN, is an experiment built for the detection of the collider neutrinos. The primary goal of SND is to measure the p+p --> +X process and search for the feebly interacting particles. It will be operational from 2022, during the LHC-Run 3 (2022-2024). SND will be installed in an empty tunnel- TI18 that links the LHC and Super Proton Synchrotron, 480m away from the ATLAS experiment interaction point in the fast forward region and along the beam collision axis.
Faïrouz Malek also known as Faïrouz Ohlsson-Malek is a French and Algerian physicist specializing in nuclear physics, particle physics and cosmology. A research scientist at the French National Centre for Scientific Research, she is involved in international research at the CERN LHC. She has contributed to the discovery of the Higgs boson. She is also known for her commitment to gender parity in science, as well as to the development of science in Africa. She is fellow of the African Academy of Sciences. She is the niece of Algerian composer Ahmed Malek.
Florencia Canelli is since 2021 the appointed Swiss scientific delegate to the CERN council, the supreme decision-making authority of the CERN Organization. From 2021-2024, she was appointed chair of the IUPAP division of particles and field (C11). From 2021-2023, she was co-coordinator of the physics program of the CMS collaboration, a CERN experiment with over 3000 physicists. In 2010, Canelli was awarded the IUPAP Young scientist prize, an international prize awarded to one experimental and one theoretical physicist per year, for "her pioneering contribution to the identification and precision measurements of rare phenomenon through the use of advanced analysis techniques to separate very small signals from large background processes at the Tevatron collider." She has been an author on four multi-purpose collider experiments, namely the CMS experiment and ATLAS experiment at the CERN LHC, and the CDF experiment and D0 experiment at the Fermilab Tevatron. She is currently a full professor at the University of Zurich, Physics Institute, specializing in particle physics.
Freya Blekman is a Dutch professor at the University of Hamburg and the lead scientist at Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron (DESY). She contributed to the discovery of the Higgs boson at CERN and has been endowed the Helmholtz Distinguished Professorship. Her individual work specializes in the physics and experimental aspects of elementary particles and fields, specifically looking at the top quark sector by using precision measurements.
