Michel Della Negra (born 1942) is a French experimental particle physicist known for his role in the 2012 discovery of the
Higgs Boson.
Career
Della Negra studied mathematics and theoretical physics for his doctorate at the Laboratory of Nuclear Physics of the
College de France in
Paris, defending his thesis on the experimental study of proton-antiproton annihilation in 1967. In the 1970s, following post-doctoral work at the
Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) in
Palo Alto, California, he involved himself on high-energy physics projects at
CERN in
Geneva, Switzerland, where he worked initially as a member of the
Intersecting Storage Rings group. In 1977 joined the team led by
Carlo Rubbia and played an important role in the 1981 discovery of the
W and
Z bosons. Della Negra and his colleague from
Imperial College London,
Tejinder Singh Virdee, were among the first to envisage a
hermetic detector for the
large hadron collider (LHC) based on a strong magnetic field, the
compact muon solenoid (CMS), and was spokesman for the CMS from 1992 until 2006. Together with evidence from the A Toroidal LHC Apparatus (ATLAS), the CMS experiments were crucial to the discovery of the
Higgs Boson in 2012. As of 2018 he is physicist emeritus of the physics department of CERN, and CMS emeritus at
Imperial College London.[1]