The International Jury of the Lagarrigue Prize, which met on Monday June 19, awarded its 2023 prize to Daniel Fournier, a physicist who has spent his entire career at the Orsay Linear Accelerator Laboratory, which is one of the founding laboratories of the new Physics of 2 Infinites Irène Joliot-Curie (IJCLab) created in 2020.
The jury recognized and praised the very brilliant career of Daniel Fournier who, after having been the first in Europe at the end of the 1970s to build a liquid argon electromagnetic calorimeter for the CELLO experiment, knew how to completely renew this concept for the adapt to the ATLAS experiment with an original accordion geometry. This subdetector was the key element in the discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012 via the two-photon, 4-lepton decay channel with electrons in the final state. Among his other remarkable scientific contributions, it is also necessary to mention the demonstration of the direct violation of CP with NA31. In all these experiences, Daniel Fournier played a leading role at the international level. His profile is therefore perfectly adapted to honor the memory of André Lagarrigue with whom he shares a passion for teaching and the transmission of knowledge, Daniel Fournier having been a professor at the University of Paris-Sud for many years and trained generations of students and doctoral students. Since his retirement, Daniel Fournier has actively participated in the analysis of ATLAS data and is also involved in the design of a noble liquid calorimeter for the FCC-ee project.
The award ceremony will take place at the end of 2023 at IJCLab.