Credit : Sylvaine Pieyre
With more than 5,000 scientists, engineers, technicians, administrators and students, CMS is one of the largest scientific collaborations in the world. With members from more than 240 institutes and universities in nearly 50 countries around the world, the collaboration exploits the data provided by the CMS experiment, one of the two giant general-purpose detectors installed along the circumference of the LHC, CERN's Large Hadron Collider.
Gautier Hamel de Monchenault, a physicist in the particle physics department at CEA-IRFU, was elected on Monday 12 February 2024 as the spokesperson for the CMS collaboration at CERN. He will hold this prestigious position from 1 September 2024 to 31 August 2026. He will be the 10th spokesperson for the CMS collaboration and the second French spokesperson to lead one of the four LHC experiments.
These intense years will see the end of the third data-taking period of the LHC as we know it, and the start of the installation of detector upgrades in preparation for the high-luminosity HL-LHC data, as well as the update of the European particle physics strategy.
Gautier Hamel de Monchenault is an outstanding physicist of world renown who has had a brilliant career in three major international collaborations formed around three high-energy colliders: Delphi at CERN with the LEP electron-positron collider, BaBar at SLAC with the PEP-2 electron-positron collider, and CMS at CERN with the LHC proton-proton collider. These collaborations have recognised his great mastery of Standard Model physics by appointing him to positions of responsibility such as physics coordinator for Babar and deputy spokesperson for CMS. Gautier has an in-depth knowledge, both theoretical and experimental, of Standard Model physics, but also of its interfaces with fundamental physics in the broadest sense, including nuclear physics, astrophysics and cosmology, which gives him a clear and global vision of the challenges in the field. This strategic vision was reinforced by his mandate as head of the IRFU's Particle Physics Department from 2016 to 2020.
This mandate as spokesman promises to be a challenge that this brilliant physicist will undoubtedly take up with brio and efficiency. Interviewed just after the announcement of his election, Gautier Hamel de Monchenault accepted the challenge: "It is an honour to take over the management of the CMS experiment at CERN's LHC, to which our Institute has contributed so much and continues to contribute. I would like to pay tribute to the visionary physicists who, as early as the 1980s, designed and built this detector, which was ideal for discovering and studying the Higgs boson and for providing an impressive harvest of scientific results. We must now live up to their vision and prepare our detector for the high-luminosity phase of the LHC from 2029.”
CMS Collaboration in 2012 (credit : 2012 CERN, for the benefit of the CMS Collaboration, Photograph: Hoch, Michael)
• The ultimate constituents of matter › Particle physics at colliders
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