Belgian professor gets important role at CERN
Steven Lowette, a physics professor from the University of Brussels (VUB) will take on an important role at CERN, the site of the Large Hadron Collider.
The European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) on the Swiss-French border is well-known as the location of the particle accelerator where the Higgs boson was discovered – which, as you may know, was in part thanks to fellow Belgian François Englert who received a Nobel prize for the discovery.
For two years, Lowette will lead the so-called CMS experiment, which will see the collisions in the particle accelerator captured on images thanks to a 14,000 tonne supermagnet, allowing scientists from nearly 60 countries to gather and analyse data from those collisions. He will also help pave the way for a major upgrade to the collider and to the CMS detector.
Professor Lowette will be spending the next two years working 175 metres below the ground, but his appointment as the head of this experiment is a testament to the fact that the sky is the limit for Belgian research.