Subject Groups

Group Prize

The winner of the 2007 HEPP Group Prize was Jim Virdee

Tejinder Virdee (Imperial College London)

Nominated by Geoff Hall, Roger Cashmore, Gavin Davies, Peter Hobson

For leadership of physics at the LHC. Tejinder (Jim) Virdee has played an extremely prominent role in promoting and developing the concepts for the next generation of physics by leading the design and much of the implementation of the CMS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider,. He was involved in the development of the CMS detector concept from the earliest days and has been influential in many areas of the detector design. He was an originator of the scheme to discover the favoured intermediate mass Higgs via its decay into two photons, which has been central to the concept of the high resolution crystal calorimeter, one of the major cornerstones of the CMS design. He stimulated and steered much of the work required to develop this innovative detector, from crystal R&D to readout. Recently, having served for many years as CMS Deputy Spokesperson, he was elected CMS Spokesperson commencing January 2007. He will therefore be responsible for completing CMS, and scientific leader of the experiment during first LHC data taking and production of physics results. He has been tireless in his efforts on behalf of CMS, including the promotion of LHC physics via media interviews, articles and other outreach efforts.

Previous Winners

2005/2006

Winner: Christine Davies

Nominated by: Tony Doyle, Richard Kenway, David Saxon and Paul Soler.

For her achievement in improving the quality of Lattice Quantum Chromodynamic predictions. She has had a leading role in this field for several years, limited in the past by the available power of algorithms and computers to the quenched approximation (no virtual sea-quarks). Improved staggered quarks and improved discretisation of the action led to successful incorporation of light sea-quarks with a resulting step-change in accuracy of predictions in comparison to data. Most noteworthy is the first accurate prediction of the Bc meson mass: its subsequent experimental verification was featured in Nature and New Scientist. In addition she is Particle Physics Theme Coordinator for the £15M Scottish Universities Physics Alliance and serves on fellowship and related committees for CERN, PPARC, Institute of Physics and Royal Society of Edinburgh. She won the 2005 Royal Society's Rosalind Franklin Award.

2004/2005

Winner: Nick Jelley

Nominated by: Brian Foster, Todd Huffman, Nevile Harnew and Ken Peach

For his role as a leader of the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory since its inception, and as group leader of the Oxford group during the period of its most exciting discoveries. Nick has in particular been associated with the production of the very demanding water purification system and the rigorous radioactive assays. He has also played a major role in the development of the SNOMAN Monte Carlo and generally in the definition of the SNO experimental programme. In Oxford he has been an inspirational supervisor of research students. Overall he is recognised internationally as one of the senior figures in an experiment which has been hugely influential in the development of our current picture of neutrino properties, and surely also has important physics results still to come.

2003/2004

Winners: Keith Green and Mike Pendlebury

Nominated by: Bob Brown, George Kalmus, Peter Norton and Ken Peach

Joint For their organisational and intellectual leadership, over many years, of the pioneering experiment at ILL Grenoble to measure the electric dipole moment of the neutron. Their latest world-leading published result (showing that, with 90% confidence, it is less than 6.3 10 -26 e-cm) imposes a very significant constraint on theories of CP violation. Their new technique, recently approved for funding, promises an increase of sensitivity of another two orders of magnitude.

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