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Professor Luciano Maiani chosen as next Director General of CERN

Luciano Maiani

 Prof. Luciano Maiani as the next Director General of the Organisation.

 

Geneva, 19 December 1997. CERN1 Council announced at its meeting on 19 December 1997, the election of Prof. Luciano Maiani as the next Director General of the Organisation. Prof. Maiani will take office as from 1 January 1999, replacing Prof. Llewellyn Smith who will have completed his 5 year mandate.

Prof. Maiani is a distinguished theoretical physicist. Gaining his first qualifications in Rome, he subsequently worked at the Universities of Florence and Harvard. He was made professor of Theoretical Physics at the University of Rome, "La Sapienza" in 1984 and since 1993 has been the President of the Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare (INFN). Prof. Maiani has been President of the CERN Council since January 1997.

Prof. Maiani has an excellent knowledge of CERN as a laboratory, and also of its governing bodies. He spent two periods of one year as a visiting Professor in the CERN Theory Division and has been a member of the Scientific Policy Committee and the Large Hadron Collider Committee. From 1993 to 1996 he was been Italy's delegate at the CERN Council before taking over the Presidency. Prof. Llewellyn Smith said "I am very happy to hand over to Professor Maiani. CERN Council has made an excellent choice and I am looking forward to working closely with Prof. Maiani to ensure a smooth transition during a critical period of LHC construction and an exciting phase of the ongoing LEP programme". Please see overleaf for a full curriculum vitae.

Dr. Hans C. Eschelbacher is new President of CERN Council

Dr. Hans C. Eschelbacher who has had a distinguished career both as a scientist and a scientific administrator was elected as President of the CERN Council for the initial period of one year starting in January 1998. As early as 1964 Dr. Eschelbacher was working in Karlsruhe Nuclear Research Centre on superconducting applications for particle accelerators. He studied under the supervision of Prof. Herwig Schopper, Director General of CERN (1982-1989). Dr Eschelbacher completed his doctoral thesis at the Institute for Experimental Nuclear Physics. In the early 1970's he spent several periods at CERN, working on the construction of a superconducting beam separator in collaboration with Dr. Herbert Lengeler. Dr. Eschelbacher has held many important posts in the German government related to science policy and funding, working as a science councillor both to the Bundestag and Federal Chancellery. He is currently responsible for funding of basic research in physics, both in German national laboratories and European collaborations. He is chairman of the supervisory board of the DESY laboratory in Hamburg and the GSI in Darmstadt and has been German delegate to the CERN Council since 1995. Dr. Eschelbacher is also responsible for the planning and funding of Germany's environmental research programme including Global Warming. See attached curriculum vitae.

Curriculum vitae of Luciano MAIANI

Born in Rome 16 July 1941

  • 1964 Degree in physics
  • 1964 Research associate, Istituto Superior di Sanità
  • 1964 Cooperation with Prof. R. Gatto's group, in the field of Theoretical Physics, University of Florence
  • 1969 Post-Doctoral fellow, Lyman Laboratory of Physics, Harvard University
  • 1976-1984 Professor of Institutions of Theoretical Physics, University of Rome "La Sapienza"
  • 1977 Visiting Professor, Ecole Normale Supérieure of Paris
  • 1979-1980 Visiting Professor, CERN, Geneva
  • 1984 Professor of Theoretical Physics, University of Rome "La Sapienza"
  • 1985-1986 Visiting Professor, CERN, Geneva
  • 1993 President of Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare
  • 1993-1996 Scientific delegate in CERN Council
  • 1995-1997 Chairman, Comitato Tecnico Scientifico, Fondo Ricerca Applicata
  • 1997 President of CERN Council

Awards

  • 1979 Matteucci Medal, Accademia Nazionale dei XL
  • 1987 Prize "J. Sakurai" of the American Physical Society
  • 1996 Laurea honoris causa, Université de la Méditerranée, Aix-Marseille

Memberships

  • 1988 Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, Rome, Italy
  • 1991 Fellow at the American Physical Society
  • 1997 Accademia Nazionale dei XL

Participation to International Committees

  • 1979-1983 The Superproton Synchrotron Committee, CERN, Geneva
  • 1984-1991 The Scientific Policy Committee, at CERN
  • 1990 Extended Research Council, Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron, DESY, Hamburg
  • 1992-1993 Large Hadron Collider Committee, CERN, Geneva
  • 1997 IUPAP, C11 sub Committee

Scientific Results

Luciano Maiani is author or co-author of over 100 scientific publications on the theory of Elementary Particles and author of several Lecture Notes and Rapporteur Talks.
His most important result is the prediction of charmed particles (with S. Glashow and J. Iliopoulos, 1970). The proposal, known as the Glashow - Ilipoulos - Maiani (GIM) mechanism, has been critical to the formulation of the unified theory of the Electroweak Interactions. Charmed particles were discovered a few years later (1976) with properties very close to those anticipated in the original GIM paper.

Other important results include:

  • the explanation of the observed octet enhancement in weak non-leptonic decays as due to leading gluon exchange effect in Quantum Chromodynamics (with G Altarelli, 1974);
  • the effect was extended to describe the weak non-leptonic decays of charmed and beauty particles as well;
  • the analysis of CP violation in the six-quark theory (1976) and the prediction
    of a very small electric dipole moment of the neutron;
  • the parton model description of heavy flavour weak decays (with N. Cabibbo, G. Altarelli, M. Corbò and G. Martinelli, 1978-9), still used to extract the weak mixing angles from inclusive semi-leptonic B-decays;
  • bounds to the Higgs boson mass from stability considerations (with N. Cabibbo, G. Parisi and R. Petronzio, 1979);
  • the first prediction of the decay constant of pseudoscalar charmed mesons, fD and fDs, with numerical simulation of lattice QCD (with M.B. Gavela, G. Martinelli, O.Pene, S. Petrarca, 1988), and of B-mesons, using the static approximation on the lattice (with C.R. Allton, C.T. Sachrajda, V. Lubiezand and G. Martinelli, 1991);
  • the value of fDs is one of the few "predictions" of lattice QCD, and is consistent with the latest experimental determinations;
  • clarifing the problem of the non-perturbative formulation of chiral lattice guage theories (with G.C. Rossi and M.Testa, 1989-1991), pointing out a still unresolved problem of naturalness of the chiral guage symmetry.

Was among the first (lecture notes at the Gif-sur-Yvette school, 1980) to point out the need of softly broken supersymmetry to stabilize against quantum corrections the very large difference between the electro weak and the grand unification mass scale (or the Planck mass scale). The search for supersymmetry at present (LEP, Tevatron) and future (LHC) accelerators is a primary goal of modern particle physics.

Research Management
President of Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare since February 1993, for a three year term renewed for a second three year term in February 1996. INFN is an Institution which supports research in nuclear, particle and astroparticle physics, with about 2000 staff (researchers, administrators, engineers, technicians) and about 1000 associates (mainly university professors). The President of INFN is directly in charge of the running of the institute, with the support of the Executive Board (four members) and the Board of Directors (34 Members).

The original INFN plan of activity for the 1994 - 8 period, approved in August 1993, envisaged a total 2590 billion lire. The scientific programme has been effectively maintained, in fact enhanced in certain parts, in spite of the severe cuts made necessary by the economic situation, which have reeduced the budget by about 10% over the same period.

Major results of the years include:

  • the completion of the ALPI (heavy ions) accelerator in Legnaro, and the installation of EUROBALL, by a large European collaboration.
  • the construction of DAFNE at Frascati (a high luminoscity eletron-positron collider optimized as a Kaon factory for the study of matter-antimatter symmetry violations)
  • the approval and the start-up of construction of VIRGO at Cascina, Pisa (a long baseline interferometer for the detection of gravitational waves, designed and built in collaboration with CNRS, France)
  • the continuation and the extension of the R&D activity with Italian industry and CERN for the LHC superconducting dipoles, which has led to the successful completion of the first 10m dipole in 1994;
  • the promotion of intense R&D projects with industry, to promote technology transfer from INFN activities in the fields of superconducting cavities, electronics and microelectronics, parallel computing, medical imaging, hadrotherapy.

Curriculum vitae
Dr.-Ing. Hans C. Eschelbacher

born on 1.10.1938 in Lübeck, married, 2 children

Certificate of Secondary Education in Hamburg, 1957. Studies: Hanover Technical University and Karlsruhe Technical University until 1963 (Dipl.-Ing. (= Degree in Engineering), Telecommunications Engineering)

1963/1964: AEG Telefunken Backnang, development engineer

July 1964 to December 1972
Karlsruhe Nuclear Research Centre, scientific employee at the Institute for Experimental Nuclear Physics; Doctorate at the Institute for High-frequency Physics, Karlsruhe TU

January 1973 to March 1978
Federal Ministry for Research and Technology (BFMT), "Basic and planning matters in environmental research and technology; DFVLR (German Research Institute for Air and Space Travel) section"

April 1978 to October 1982
CDU/CSU section of the Federal Parliament, Head of the Research and Technology Working Group

October 1982 to June 1984
BFMT, Head of "Basic and planning matters in energy research and technology" section.

June 1984 to April 1987
BMFT, Head of "Work planning; Cabinet and Parliamentary Business" section

April 1987 to February 1991
Office of the Federal Chancellor, Head of "Research and technology policy" section

February 1991 to December 1993
Office of the Federal Chancellor, "Agrarian and research policy" group leader

January 1994 to January 1995
Head of "Basic research; Co-ordination of research; International co-operation" division

Since February 1995
Federal Ministry for Education, Science, Research and Technology
Head of "Scientific promotion, Basic research" sub-division.

1. CERN, the European Laboratory for Particle Physics, has its headquarters in Geneva. At present, its Member States are Austria, Belgium, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, the Slovak Republic, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom. Israel, Japan, the Russian Federation,the United States of America, Turkey, the European Commission and Unesco have observer status.