Guido Tonelli (born 1950) is an Italian particle physicist who was involved with the discovery of the Higgs boson at the Large Hadron Collider.[1] He is a professor of General Physics at the University of Pisa (Italy) and a CERN visiting scientist.
Guido Tonelli (born 1950) is an Italian particle physicist who was involved with the discovery of the Higgs boson at the Large Hadron Collider.[1] He is a professor of General Physics at the University of Pisa (Italy) and a CERN visiting scientist.
He was born in Casola in Lunigiana, Italy, on 8 November 1950. He received his high school diploma in 1969 at the liceo classico Lorenzo Costa of La Spezia with a vote of 60/60. Subsequently, he received his degree in physics in 1975 at the University of Pisa (with a vote of 110/110), Italy where he became professor in 1992. Since 1976 he works in the field of high energy physics, participating in CERN experiments NA1, NA7 and ALEPH, and in the CDF experiment at Fermilab, Batavia (IL-USA). Among his contributions there are the first precision measurements of the lifetime of charmed mesons, precision tests of the Standard Model of the fundamental interactions, search for the Higgs boson, and for various signatures of Supersymmetry or new physics beyond the Standard Model.
Since the beginning of the '90 his activity is mainly devoted to the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS), experiment proposed for the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, Geneva, (Switzerland). He participates in CMS since the conceptual design contributing with the original idea of a central tracker fully based on semiconductor devices.[2] He is elected as CMS Spokesperson for the years 2010-2011.[3]
On 13 December 2011 together with Fabiola Gianotti, ATLAS Spokesperson, he presented in a special seminar at CERN the first evidence of the presence of the Higgs boson around a mass of 125 GeV/c2.[4] The 125GeV signal appears again in the new data collected in spring 2012, and, combining the 7 TeV 2011 data with the 8TeV, 2012 data, the statistical significance of the signal reaches the conventional 5 sigma threshold needed to announce a new discovery. Therefore, on 4 July 2012, the ATLAS and CMS experiments announce formally the observation of a new Higgs-like boson at LHC.[5]
On 14 March 2013 new results presented by ATLAS and CMS at the Moriond Conference in La Thuile confirm that all observations are consistent with the hypothesis the observed particle being the Standard Model Higgs boson.[6]
Thanks to this discovery, on 8 October 2013 the Nobel Prize in Physics 2013 was assigned to François Englert and Peter Higgs with the motivation "for the theoretical discovery of a mechanism that contributes to our understanding of the origin of mass of subatomic particles, and which recently was confirmed through the discovery of the predicted fundamental particle, by the ATLAS and CMS experiments at CERN's Large Hadron Collider".[7]
