Sir Tejinder Singh Virdee, ( Punjabi: ਤਜਿੰਦਰ ਸਿੰਘ ਵਿਰਦੀ, born 13 October 1952), is a

Kenya Kenya, officially the Republic of Kenya, is a country located in East Africa. With an estimated population of more than 52.4 million as of mid-2024, Kenya is the 27th-most-populous country in the world and the 7th most populous in Africa. ...

n-born British experimental particle physicist and Professor of Physics at

Imperial College London Imperial College London, also known as Imperial, is a Public university, public research university in London, England. Its history began with Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, Prince Albert, husband of Queen Victoria, who envisioned a Al ...

. He is best known for originating the concept of the

Compact Muon Solenoid The Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiment is one of two large general-purpose particle physics detectors built on the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN in Switzerland and France. The goal of the CMS experiment is to investigate a wide range ...

(CMS) with a few other colleagues and has been referred to as one of the 'founding fathers' of the project. CMS is a world-wide collaboration which started in 1991 and now has over 3500 participants from 50 countries. In recognition of his work on CMS, Virdee has been awarded numerous prizes and distinctions. In 2007, he was awarded the IOP High Energy Particle Physics group prize and in 2009 the IOP Chadwick Medal and Prize. In 2012 he was elected Fellow of the

Royal Society The Royal Society, formally The Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge, is a learned society and the United Kingdom's national academy of sciences. The society fulfils a number of roles: promoting science and its benefits, re ...

and Honorary Fellow of the

Institute of Physics The Institute of Physics (IOP) is a UK-based not-for-profit learned society and professional body that works to advance physics education, physics research, research and applied physics, application. It was founded in 1874 and has a worldwide ...

(IOP). In 2013 he was awarded the Special Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics for "leadership in the scientific endeavour that led to the discovery of the new Higgs-like particle by the

ATLAS An atlas is a collection of maps; it is typically a bundle of world map, maps of Earth or of a continent or region of Earth. Advances in astronomy have also resulted in atlases of the celestial sphere or of other planets. Atlases have traditio ...

and CMS collaborations at

CERN The European Organization for Nuclear Research, known as CERN (; ; ), is an intergovernmental organization that operates the largest particle physics laboratory in the world. Established in 1954, it is based in Meyrin, western suburb of Gene ...

Large Hadron Collider The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is the world's largest and highest-energy particle accelerator. It was built by the CERN, European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) between 1998 and 2008, in collaboration with over 10,000 scientists, ...

(LHC)",

Virdee plans to use the money to support science in schools in Sub-Saharan Africa—see

and the

European Physical Society The European Physical Society (EPS) is a non-profit organisation whose purpose is to promote physics and physicists in Europe through methods such as physics outreach, supporting physicists to engage in the design and implementation of European s ...

High Energy and Particle Physics Prize The High Energy and Particle Physics Prize, established in 1989, is awarded every two years by the European Physical Society (EPS) for an outstanding contribution to high energy and particle physics. Recipients Source: * 1989 Georges Charpak * ...

. In 2015 he was awarded the IOP Glazebrook Medal and Prize for his leadership of the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiment at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) where evidence for the Higgs boson was revealed after 20 years of research involving design, construction and data-taking. In 2017 he was granted the

American Physical Society The American Physical Society (APS) is a not-for-profit membership organization of professionals in physics and related disciplines, comprising nearly fifty divisions, sections, and other units. Its mission is the advancement and diffusion of ...

Panofsky Prize The Panofsky Prize in Experimental Particle Physics is an annual prize of the American Physical Society. It is given to recognize and encourage outstanding achievements in experimental particle physics, and is open to scientists of any nation. It w ...

for his pioneering work and outstanding leadership in the making of the CMS experiment, and in 2020 the Blaise Pascal Medal of the European Academy of Sciences in Physics. In 2024, he was awarded the Royal Medal (Physical) of the Royal Society. The citation reads: "for extraordinary leadership and profound impact on all phases of the monumental CMS experiment at the CERN Large Hadron Collider, including the crucial discovery of the Higgs boson through its decays to two photons." In 2014, Virdee was knighted in the Queen's Birthday Honours list for services to science. Virdee has served on Scientific Advisory Committees of numerous international physics institutes and on the Physical Sciences jury for the

Infosys Prize The Infosys Prize is an annual award granted to scientists, researchers, engineers and social scientists of Indian origin (not necessarily born in India) by the Infosys Science Foundation and ranks among the highest monetary awards for researc ...

in 2020.

Early life and education

Tejinder Virdee was born in 1952 to Sikh parents Udham Kaur and Chain Singh Virdee in

Nyeri Nyeri is a town situated in the Central Highlands of Kenya. It is the county headquarters of Nyeri County and was the central administrative headquarters of the country's former Central Province (Kenya), Central Province. The town is situated a ...

. Virdee went to school in Kisumu at the Kisumu Boys High School. Due to the prevailing circumstances in Kenya at the time, his family (of Indian

Sikh Sikhs (singular Sikh: or ; , ) are an ethnoreligious group who adhere to Sikhism, a religion that originated in the late 15th century in the Punjab region of the Indian subcontinent, based on the revelation of Guru Nanak. The term ''Si ...

origin) emigrated in 1967 to

Birmingham Birmingham ( ) is a City status in the United Kingdom, city and metropolitan borough in the metropolitan county of West Midlands (county), West Midlands, within the wider West Midlands (region), West Midlands region, in England. It is the Lis ...

, England. He credits part of his interest in physics to Howard Stockley, his physics teacher at

King's Norton Boys' School King Edward VI King’s Norton School for Boys, (formerly known as King’s Norton Boys’ School) is a secondary school for around 800 pupils aged 11 to 16. It is located on Northfield Road in Kings Norton within the formal district of Northf ...

, Birmingham, whom he describes as an 'inspirational teacher'. He also remembers visiting Birmingham Museum of Science and Industry, where he stumbled across a cloud chamber sparking his interest in the study of the structure of matter. Virdee obtained a B.Sc. in Physics from

Queen Mary College, University of London Queen Mary University of London (QMUL, or informally QM, and formerly Queen Mary and Westfield College) is a public university, public research university in Mile End, East London, England. It is a member institution of the federal University ...

in 1974.

Research career

After completing his Ph.D. at

, on an experiment conducted at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (

SLAC SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, originally named the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, is a federally funded research and development center in Menlo Park, California, United States. Founded in 1962, the laboratory is now sponsored ...

) in

California California () is a U.S. state, state in the Western United States that lies on the West Coast of the United States, Pacific Coast. It borders Oregon to the north, Nevada and Arizona to the east, and shares Mexico–United States border, an ...

, he joined

in 1979 as a Fellow of the Experimental Physics Division. Virdee’s early scientific career (1979-1984) involved verifying the strange notion that the “quarks” (the constituents of the protons the neutrons and all other hadrons) carry fractional electric charge. This was successfully demonstrated by the NA14 photoproduction experiment at

in the mid-eighties. Following NA14 he joined the UA1 experiment at

's proton-antiproton collider ( SPS) where his interest in high-performance calorimetry was developed, leading to his invention of a novel technique of collecting light in plastic scintillator-based calorimeters. Towards the end of UA1, (1990) Virdee, with a few other colleagues, started planning an experiment based on a high field solenoid that would be able to identify the missing elements of the

Standard Model The Standard Model of particle physics is the Scientific theory, theory describing three of the four known fundamental forces (electromagnetism, electromagnetic, weak interaction, weak and strong interactions – excluding gravity) in the unive ...

(SM) and also to probe in full the physics of the TeV scale. This was to become the

CMS CMS may refer to: Computing * Call management system * CMS-2, a programming language implemented for and used by the United States Navy * Code Morphing Software, a technology used by Transmeta * Collection management system for a museum coll ...

experiment at the

LHC The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is the world's largest and highest-energy particle accelerator. It was built by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) between 1998 and 2008, in collaboration with over 10,000 scientists, and ...

, one of the most complex instruments science has ever seen. Since 1991 Virdee has played a crucial role in all phases of

. Over the last two decades this has covered conceptual design, intensive R&D, prototyping, construction, installation, commissioning, data-taking and finally physics exploitation. He has been the driving force behind many of the major technology decisions made in

, especially the selection of the calorimeter technologies. The

hadron calorimeter uses the technique he had invented earlier. The possibility of discovering a Higgs-like boson played a crucial role in the conceptual design of

, and served as a benchmark to test the performance of the experiment. In 1992, at a meeting in Evian, entitled ‘Towards the LHC Experimental Programme’ meeting, Virdee championed the case for the selection of CMS amongst four competing experiment conceptual designs. After much deliberation, CERN’s LHC experiments peer-review committee, the LHCC, eventually chose two, one being the CMS design. In 1990 Virdee and a colleague, Christopher Seez, carried out the first detailed simulation studies of the most plausible way to detect the SM

Higgs boson The Higgs boson, sometimes called the Higgs particle, is an elementary particle in the Standard Model of particle physics produced by the excited state, quantum excitation of the Higgs field, one of the field (physics), fields in particl ...

in the low-mass region in the environment of the

: via its decay into two photons. After intensive R&D Virdee argued that dense scintillating crystals offer the best possibility of achieving excellent energy resolution. In 1994, he made a compelling case for the use of lead tungstate scintillating crystals (PbWO4) for the electromagnetic calorimeter of

as being the most promising detector for the discovery of the Higgs boson via its two-photon decay mode. He made the case within the CMS experiment, to CERN’s Management and to the LHCC. He led the team that proved the viability of this technique, a technique that has played a crucial role in the discovery of the new heavy boson, in July 2012. Virdee was deeply involved in the data analysis for the search for the Higgs boson, especially via its two-photon decay mode whose analysis was very much along the lines described in the study above. CMS’ signal for the discovery of the Higgs boson was the strongest in this decay mode. Virdee was the deputy project leader of

between 1993 and 2006 and was then elected project leader (Spokesperson) in January 2007 for a period of three years. He oversaw the final stages of construction, installation and data taking with the first collisions at the

. Virdee is a major voice in arguing for the long-term future of the

accelerator and its experiments. An increase in the interaction rate by almost a factor of around ten is being advocated for the CMS and

experiments. To benefit fully from this luminosity increase the CMS detector will be upgraded. Virdee is leading efforts to replace the detector's endcaps with a novel silicon-based technology that measures the energy and momentum of particles to unprecedented levels of precision. Beyond his contributions to particle physics he is a promoter of science and education, especially in Africa. He funds science-related education activities in schools and universities in Africa, India and the United Kingdom.

Invited lectures and outreach

Virdee has given several keynote speeches at international conferences, opening or closing addresses at particle physics conferences and public lectures on the LHC Project. These include the 2007 Schrödinger Lecture, the 2012 Peter Lindsay Lectures at Imperial College, the 16th Kaczmarczik Lecture at Drexel University, Philadelphia in 2011, the Keynote Speech at the 2009 Intel International Science and Engineering Fair, Reno, USA and joint lectures on the LHC Project with Prof.

Edward Witten Edward Witten (born August 26, 1951) is an American theoretical physics, theoretical physicist known for his contributions to string theory, topological quantum field theory, and various areas of mathematics. He is a professor emeritus in the sc ...

in Philadelphia, U.S.A. (2008) and Split, Croatia (2009). Amongst his interviews are a dialogue with

A. C. Grayling Anthony Clifford Grayling (; born 3 April 1949) is a British philosopher and author. He was born in Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia) and spent most of his childhood there and in Nyasaland (now Malawi). Until June 2011, he was Professor of Philos ...

, and an interview with

Jim Al-Khalili Jameel Sadik "Jim" Al-Khalili (; born 20 September 1962) is an Iraqi-British theoretical physicist and science populariser. He is professor of theoretical physics and chair in the public engagement in science at the University of Surrey. He is a ...

on the

BBC The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) is a British public service broadcaster headquartered at Broadcasting House in London, England. Originally established in 1922 as the British Broadcasting Company, it evolved into its current sta ...

Radio 4 programme “The Life Scientific”.

Professional Awards

* 2024 Awarded the

Royal Medal The Royal Medal, also known as The Queen's Medal and The King's Medal (depending on the gender of the monarch at the time of the award), is a silver-gilt medal, of which three are awarded each year by the Royal Society. Two are given for "the mo ...

of the

. * 2020 Awarded the Blaise Pascal Medal of the European Academy of Sciences in Physics. * 2018 Awarded Doctor of Science (honoris causa) by Panjab University, Chandigarh, India. * 2017 Awarded the

of the

. * 2015 Awarded the

Richard Glazebrook Medal and Prize. * 2013 Awarded the

High Energy Physics Prize. * 2013 Awarded Doctor of Science (honoris causa) by

University of Lyon The University of Lyon ( , or UdL) is a university system ( ''ComUE'') based in Lyon, France. It comprises 12 members and 9 associated institutions. The 3 main constituent universities in this center are: Claude Bernard University Lyon 1, which f ...

. *2013 Awarded Doctor of Science (honoris causa) by

Queen Mary University of London Queen Mary University of London (QMUL, or informally QM, and formerly Queen Mary and Westfield College) is a public university, public research university in Mile End, East London, England. It is a member institution of the federal University ...

, his alma mater. * 2012 Awarded the 2013 Special Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics. * 2009 Awarded the

James Chadwick Medal and Prize The Institute of Physics (IOP) awards numerous prizes to acknowledge contributions to physics research, education and applications. It also offers smaller specific subject-group prizes, such as for PhD thesis submissions. Bilateral awards * Th ...

. * 2007 Awarded the

Bibliography

Public Lectures

* 2018 "''Exploring Nature Moments after the Big Bang''", H. C. Hans Memorial Lecture, 5 March 2018, Panjab University, Chandigarh, India. * 2016 "''The Long Road to the Higgs boson and Beyond''”, J. N. Tata Memorial Lecture, IISc Bangalore, India. * 2016 “''The Long Road to the Higgs boson and Beyond''”, Alan Astbury Lecture, Victoria, Canada. * 2013 "''The Quest for the Higgs boson at the LHC: A Historical Perspective''”, Barcelona, Spain * 2012 Peter Lindsay Lectures at Imperial College. * 2012 Special lecture on the discovery of the Higgs Boson at Imperial College London
video
. * 2012 “''Searching for the Higgs boson''”, Cheltenham Science Festival, U.K. * 2011 “''Exploring Nature Moments after the Big Bang: The LHC Accelerator and the CMS Experiment''”, 16th Kaczmarczik Lecture, Drexel University, Philadelphia, U.S.A. * 2009 “''Discovering the Quantum Universe; The LHC Project at CERN''”, Keynote Speaker at the Intel Science and Engineering Fair in Reno, U.S.A.
video
* 2008 “''Discovering the Quantum Universe; The LHC Project at CERN''”, International Conference on High Energy Physics, Philadelphia, USA with Prof. E. Witten. * 2007 “''Discovering the Quantum Universe: The Large Hadron Collider Project at CERN''”, 20th Schrodinger Lecture, Centennial of Imperial College: London, U.K.
video

Video and Radio

* 2013 Participated in workshops promoting science education in Africa to Secondary Schools students with the BBC World Service programmes for “BBC Festival of Science Africa”, broadcast from Makerere University, Kampala, Uganda.
audio
* 2012 Featured on the BBC Radio programme, “''Life Scientific''”, that discusses the scientific life of individual scientists, 20 March 2012.
audio
* 2009 Dialogue on the LHC project and CMS with Prof. A. C. Grayling, broadcast on BBC World Service programme “''Exchanges at the Frontier''”.
audio

video

Other Recognition

* 2015 Awarded the Outstanding Achievement in Science and Technology award at

The Asian Awards The Asian Awards is an annual award ceremony for the global British Asian, Asian community which takes place in the United Kingdom, with 14 categories that include business, philanthropy, entertainment, culture and sport. Nominees are selected by ...

*2014 Asian Achievers Awards: Professional of the Year. *2013 GG2 Award. *2010 The Sikh Awards: Sikhs in Education. *2010 Named 62nd in “EUREKA 100: The Science List” - The London Times' 100 most important figures in British science. *2007 Named in the list of “100 Personalities that make Swiss Romandie”; l’Hebdo magazine, Switzerland.

References

External links

Imperial High Energy Physics Group

CERN CMS
* {{DEFAULTSORT:Virdee, Tejinder 1952 births Living people Academics of Imperial College London Alumni of Imperial College London Alumni of Queen Mary University of London British physicists Knights Bachelor Kenyan emigrants to the United Kingdom British people of Indo-Kenyan descent Kenyan people of Indian descent British people of Indian descent People associated with CERN Scientists from Birmingham, West Midlands British people of Punjabi descent Winners of the Panofsky Prize Fellows of the Royal Society