Aug 24 2009
Prof Stefan Soldner-Rembold from University of Manchester has taken over as one of the two elected spokespeople for the Dzero experiment at Fermilab in the United States.
Dzero is one two large experiments bring conducted at the Tevatron collider, currently the highest energy running particle accelerator in the world.
The experiment has been running for about 20 years and currently 550 scientists and 150 graduate students, from 89 institutions and 18 countries, work on the experiment.
The two spokespeople lead the collaboration and carry executive authority over all aspects of the work of the DZero Collaboration.
There have been around 2,000 physicists who have worked on the Dzero experiment over its 25 year history - and Prof Soldner-Rembold is only the ninth to be elected as a spokesperson.
He is only the second person working for a non-US institute ever to have been elected to serve in the role - the other one was fellow Manchester physicist Prof Terry Wyatt, who was spokesperson from 2004 to 2007.
Highlights of the Dzero experiment include the discovery of the top quark - the heaviest known elementary particle, the discovery of exotic heavy baryons and the search for the Higgs boson, with the potential to either see evidence for its existence or to exclude it.
During Professor Soldner-Rembold’s two-year term he will receive extra support from the UK’s Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC), allowing him to spend most of his time at Fermilab in Chicago.
The Manchester group working on Dzero consists of two professors, one Royal Society Research Fellow, one Royal Society Newton Fellow, three RAs and five graduate students.