Interview with Peter Jenni
Peter Jenni, former spokesperson of the ATLAS Collaboration, discusses the challenges and satisfactions from his long-standing career in high-energy physics in this month’s PH Newsletter.
Peter Jenni.
Following a long career at CERN that dates back to 1970 (ranging from Summer Student to Fellow and to Staff), Peter Jenni recently retired after about 40 years marked by exciting discoveries (from the first two-photon production of eta-prime at SPEAR to the Higgs boson at the LHC). Peter was involved in the LHC from its very beginnings and was spokesperson of the ATLAS Collaboration until February 2009.
Peter Jenni will continue working with ATLAS as a guest scientist with the Albert-Ludwigs-University Freiburg, and when he's not travelling he still spends most of his time in his office in Building 40, where he met with interviewer Panos Charitos.
Panos Charitos: When did you first arrive to CERN?
Peter Jenni: I first came to CERN as a Summer Student in the very early 70s, following a period during which I was working as a member of the University of Bern Group for my diploma thesis on an experiment at the SC. It was an experiment that produced muonium atoms in a magnetic bottle. Later, I returned as a Fellow in the group of Massimiliano Ferro-Luzzi working on my PhD thesis, which I finally defended at ETH Zurich in 1976.
My thesis focused on very small angle elastic scattering in the Coulomb-nuclear interference region. We were looking at the scattering amplitude and its real part and applied the results in dispersion relations, predicting the cross sections at very high energies. At this point, I started getting interested in high energy physics.
I was motivated to come as a Fellow by Charles Peyrou, the division leader of the TC department and a guest professor at the University of Bern. I was often the only student in the lectures that he used to deliver on Saturday morning at the University of Bern.
After finishing my PhD I joined the ETH Zurich group working in the ISR (R702) experiment. The spokesperson was Pierre Darriulat and there I also met Burton Richter who at that time was on a sabbatical from SLAC. He was interested in studying electron-muon coincidences as a first signature of open charm production. Therefore the Zurich group built a small muon spectrometer with the help of CERN to complement the electron arms of R702. At that time, the J/ψ was known but an open-charm quark had not been observed yet. Hence, the idea was to look for open-charm since, when a charm quark pair is produced, an electron -muon pair can appears sometimes in the decay chain giving a unique signature.
Click here to continue reading the PH Newletter’s interview with Peter Jenni.
