Wormser takes the reins at LAL
Guy Wormser has been named director of the Laboratoire de l'Accélérateur Linéaire (LAL) at Orsay, with effect from 1 September 2005. He succeeds Bernard D'Almagne.
Wormser joined LAL in 1977, when he was newly graduated from the Paris Ecole Normale Supérieure. During his time at the laboratory he has worked at CERN and has also forged extensive ties in the US, in particular at SLAC. At the end of the first phase of the Large Electron Positron (LEP) collider project, where he worked on the DELPHI experiment, Wormser participated in the PEP-II project at SLAC and persuaded French researchers to join the nascent BaBar collaboration, thus contributing to the new era of international collaboration at SLAC.
Since then, Wormser's leadership has extended to other areas, including computing with the DataGRID and Enabling Grids for E-science projects. A member and chairman of numerous international committees, he was named deputy director of IN2P3 from 1999 to 2003. He recently created and chairs a new panel of the International Committee for Future Accelerators, which is devoted to the international coordination of computing in high-energy physics, and he co-chairs the French Global Design Effort for the International Linear Collider (ILC).
With more than 300 people, including 100 physicists, LAL is the largest laboratory of CNRS/IN2P3 devoted to particle physics and enjoys strong links with Paris XI University. It plays a major role, both at the construction stage and in data analysis, in many particle-physics experiments at CERN, DESY and in the US. It is also involved in neutrino physics and is making major contributions to astroparticle and cosmology projects. In addition, the laboratory is a key participant in long-term machine projects, such as the German XFEL, the ILC and the Compact Linear Collider at CERN, where the LAL accelerator group is a major partner for R&D and construction, as it was for LEP.
Under Wormser's influence, LAL will undoubtedly retain its impact on present and future research in particle physics, and remain one of the main European centres for particle physics and cosmology, committed to excellence and international partnerships.
Italian Physical Society honours theorists of gravity
Sergio Ferrara and Gabriele Veneziano of CERN, and Bruno Zumino of the University of California, Berkeley, have been awarded the 2005 Enrico Fermi prize of the Italian Physical Society. The trio of Italians were said to have "honoured Italian physics with their discoveries, which have contributed in substantial ways to the development of the modern theories of gravity."
In particular, Ferrara receives the award for his contribution to the discovery of supergravity theory; Veneziano for the discovery of dual models, which were recognized subsequently as the theoretical base of the string theory version of quantum gravity; and Zumino for his contributions to the theory of supersymmetry and supergravity.