Professor Rolf-Dieter Heuer the present director general of CERN, was born in 1948 in Boll/Goeppingen. He studied physics at the University of Stuttgart where he graduated in 1974, and obtained his PhD at the University of Heidelberg in 1977. Prof. Heuer is an experimental particle physicist. Most of his scientific work has been related to the study of electron-positron reactions, development of experimental techniques, as well as construction and running of large detector systems.
In 1977 he became research scientist at the University of Heidelberg working for the JADE experiment at the electron-positron storage ring PETRA until 1983, situated at the Deutsche Elektronen- Synchrotron DESY in Hamburg. From 1984 to 1998, Prof. Heuer was a staff member at CERN, working for the OPAL experiment at the electron-positron storage ring LEP. He was responsible for the coordination of design and construction of the tracking jet chamber and coordinated the whole tracking system during the experiment construction phase. He then became the run coordinator during the start-up phase of LEP1 in 1989-1992 and the OPAL spokesperson in 1994-1998, responsible for all aspects of the collaboration, comprising over 300 physicists, and for its scientific output. His term of office covered LEP1 data analysis and the LEP2 energy upgrade.
In 1998, Rolf-Dieter Heuer was appointed to a chair at the University of Hamburg (C4 professor). He established a group working on the preparations for experiments at an electronpositron Linear Collider which quickly became one of the leading groups in this area world wide. Since December 2004, Prof. Heuer is research director for particle and astroparticle physics at the DESY laboratory, a member of the Helmholtz association. The main emphasis is to orient the particle physics groups at DESY towards LHC, the LHC luminosity upgrade, ILC and detector R&D, to maintain DESY as the central particle physics laboratory in Germany, and to strengthen the links to the Universities and the links to CERN. Recently he initiated the restructuring and focusing of German particle physics at the energy frontier with particular emphasis on the LHC.
Talk on "The Large Hadron Collider: Shedding light on the Dark Universe"
Abstract of the Talk:
Despite the great success of the Standard Model, many key questions in particle physics and cosmology are unanswered. In particular, some 95% of the Universe consist of unknown dark matter and dark energy. Today, particle physics is about to enter the Terascale, the energy regime of Tera electron Volt, opening up a new chapter in high-energy physics. This will provide a deeper understanding of the Universe and any of the insights gained could dramatically change our view of the world. With the start-up of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN this year we expect revolutionary results explaining the origin of matter, unravelling the nature of dark matter and providing hints on dark energy. The talk will address these fascinating questions.
