Lecture by Prof. Daniel Denegri – Particle Physics and the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) Project
On Wednesday, April 20, 2011, at 1 p.m, as part of the series Distinguished Scientists at the Ruđer Bošković Institute, a lecture entitled Particle Physics and the LHC Project will be delivered by Prof. Daniel Denegri. Profesor Denegri is one of the leading Croatian physicists. For the past 20 years, he has worked at the European Center for Nuclear Research (CERN) and is a world-renowned scientist in the field of particle physics.
He completed elementary and secondary schooling in Split, and is a graduate of the Faculty of Science, University of Zagreb. During his doctoral studies at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, USA, he became totally immersed in particle physics. Following the defense of his doctoral dissertation and postdoctoral training, he transferred to the Department of Particle Physics at the CEA Saclay Centre in France, where he is closely associated with CERN.
During his time in the USA and first years in Saclay, based upon data obtained from Brookhaven, Cern and Serpukov, he studied the mechanisms of kaon-nucleon reactions. In 1983, he was a member of the team that discovered the existence of W and Z particles, thereby laying the foundations for modern subatomic particle physics. It should be noted that the project leaders Carlo Rubbia and Simon van der Meer shared the Nobel Prize for Physics the following year. Prof. Denegri's contribution was the construction of a calorimetric particle detector and the introduction of a new approach for separating rare events of interest to them from a complex background. He was a member of the team that discovered the top quark, one of the basic units of the standard model.
Professor Denegri has published over 170 scientific papers that were cited over 13,000 times. He was one of the leaders of the Compact Muon Solenoid Experiment (CMS) Collaboration (part of the LHC Collaboration), which today includes 3,000 scientists from around the world and is responsible for the inclusion of Croatian scientists at CERN.
