Carleton University’s Manuella Vincter, professor in the Department of Physics, has been selected as Deputy Spokesperson for ATLAS at CERN, the European organization for nuclear research. The Spokesperson and two deputies oversee all aspects of the ATLAS physics project, including operations of the detector and its scientific output. Vincter’s mandate will begin March 1, 2019.
“It is my pleasure to congratulate Prof. Vincter on being selected as Deputy Spokesperson for ATLAS at CERN,” said Rafik Goubran, vice-president (Research and International). “Carleton has made important contributions to the ATLAS physics project from the early stages and I am certain that her experience and leadership will be a considerable asset to the project’s success.”
Vincter has made precision measurements of the electroweak force, the structure of the neutron and proton and most recently the properties of the W and Z bosons, carriers of the electroweak force. She played a leading role in the scientific development of the ATLAS collaboration, which in 2012 discovered the Higgs boson.
“It was a pleasant surprise to be asked to become one of the two deputy spokespersons of the ATLAS Collaboration,” said Vincter. “I am excited about the opportunity to contribute to the continued success of ATLAS, an experimental collaboration that has provided me and the Carleton-ATLAS team with so many opportunities. I most look forward to working with the many students and early career scientists who form the heart of ATLAS and helping them fulfil their scientific aspirations.”
It will be Vincter’s responsibility to work with ATLAS stakeholders to ensure proper operation of the ATLAS detector and the quality of data for use in physics analyses. She will also work with the ATLAS Speakers’ Committee to select speakers for international conferences and engage with the team leaders of the ATLAS institutes to ensure proper implementation of responsibilities required for maintenance, operation and upgrades of the detector.
The Large Hadron Collider (LHC), part of the ATLAS project, will enter a two-year shutdown starting in January 2019 for maintenance and upgrade of critical detector components, including some involving Carleton. Given the scope of the ATLAS experiment and its close proximity to the main campus of CERN, the ATLAS experimental cavern will have visits from many world leaders and international scientific leadership representatives, as well as the media and the entertainment world.
The Canadian involvement in ATLAS and the LHC started in 1992. The Carleton-ATLAS team was a major contributor to the forward calorimeter detector, built at Carleton, which has been successfully operating in ATLAS since the start of collisions in 2009. The team is actively involved, via two major CFI awards, in constructing new sub-detector components for future upgrades of the ATLAS detector. Carleton is the lead institute in Canada for the New Small Wheel muon-system project and a leading contributor to the new Inner Tracker project. The advent of the LHC data-taking era led to growth in the team from two Carleton faculty more than 10 years ago to what is today a team of six faculty members, including Alain Bellerive, Dag Gillberg, Jesse Heilman, Gerald Oakham, Thomas Koffas, Manuella Vincter, three postdoctoral fellows and seven graduate students.
About ATLAS and CERN
The ATLAS experiment based at the CERN Laboratory in Geneva, Switzerland is an experimental particle physics endeavour that uses the high-energy proton collisions from the LHC to reproduce the conditions of the early universe less than a billionth of a second after the big bang. The ATLAS Collaboration consists of approximately 5,500 members, including close to 2,500 PhD-holding physicists and 1,700 graduate students from 231 institutes and 38 countries. In July 2012, the ATLAS Collaboration announced the observation of a new particle consistent with the long-sought after Higgs boson. This ground-breaking discovery is a significant experimental achievement of fundamental physics. The 2013 Nobel Prize in Physics was a direct consequence of this discovery. Since the start of data-taking in 2010, ATLAS has submitted or published approximately 800 peer-reviewed scientific journal articles.
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Friday, October 12, 2018 in News Releases
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