Dave Charlton, Professor of Particle Physics at the University of Birmingham takes on lead role at the ATLAS experiment at CERN

20-3-2013 — /europawire.eu/ — Dave Charlton, Professor of Particle Physics at the University of Birmingham’s School of Physics and Astronomy, took up the position of Spokesperson, the overall scientific lead, for the ATLAS project at the Large Hadron Collider, CERN, on 1 March 2013.

Professor Charlton has been Deputy Spokesperson of ATLAS since July 2009.

ATLAS is a large scale international collaboration of approximately 3000 scientists. Since 2009 it has been one of the world’s two largest operating particle physics experiments, alongside its sister experiment CMS, at the Large Hadron Collider. Together, ATLAS and CMS recently discovered the elusive particle, the Higgs boson, a key building block of the Standard Model of Physics.

Professor Charlton has held a range of positions within the ATLAS Collaboration, and has been a staff member of the University of Birmingham since 1994.

Of his appointment Professor Charlton said: ‘It is a great honour to have been selected to act as Spokesperson for the next two years by my colleagues on ATLAS. The major step forward in discovering the Higgs boson is a result of the dedication and drive of so many colleagues from all around the world over the years, and it is a great privilege to represent them.

‘The next two years represent a very different time for ATLAS, as we now enter a period of mixed activities: analysing the data collected until now, consolidating and upgrading parts of the detector during the first long shutdown of the LHC, and preparing ourselves for the new data to come when the LHC restarts in 2015, at almost twice the energy achieved so far.’

Notes to Editors

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