Pierre Darriulat is awarded the André Lagarrigue Prize

Former CERN Research Director, Pierre Darriulat, who is now Professor of Physics at VATLY in Hanoi (Vietnam), has won the 2008 André Lagarrigue Prize. This prize, instituted by the Linear Accelerator Laboratory (LAL) at Orsay under the aegis of the French Physical Society, is awarded to front-line researchers who have had responsibility for machine/detector construction and derived maximum scientific benefit from such projects, performed in a French laboratory or in close collaboration with French groups.

Pierre Darriulat has received the award in recognition of his outstanding career at the CEA, at LBL (Berkeley) and at CERN from 1964 onwards. At CERN he managed the experiments at the Intersecting Storage Rings (ISR) before taking charge of the UA2 collaboration from 1980 to 1986, which participated in decisive discoveries at the ppbar collider. In particular, in 1982, the UA2 experiment began observing high transverse momentum quark jets coming from collisions in the ppbar collider, followed by the W and Z bosons, which carry the weak interaction, in 1983. As Research Director at CERN from 1987 to 1994, he supervised the LEP experiment programme. After retiring, Pierre Darriulat founded the Vietnam Auger Training LaboratorY (VATLY) in Hanoi, a facility dedicated to studying very high-energy cosmic rays, of which he remains the Director to this day.