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Tejinder Virdee
Sir Tejinder Singh Virdee, FRS (Punjabi: ਤਜਿੰਦਰ ਸਿੰਘ ਵਿਰਦੀ, born 13 October 1952), is a Kenyan-born British experimental particle physicist and Professor of Physics at Imperial College London. He is best known for originating the concept of the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) alongside 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 and Honorary Fellow of the Institute of Physics (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 and CMS collaborations at CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC)", and the European Physical Society High Energy and Particle Physics Prize.
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 Panofsky Prize 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 in 2020.
Tejinder Virdee was born in 1952 to Sikh parents Udham Kaur and Chain Singh Virdee in Nyeri, Kenya. 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 origin) emigrated in 1967 to Birmingham, England. He credits part of his interest in physics to Howard Stockley, his physics teacher at King's Norton Boys' School, 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 in 1974.
After completing his Ph.D. at Imperial College London, on an experiment conducted at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) in California, he joined CERN 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 CERN in the mid-eighties. Following NA14 he joined the UA1 experiment at CERN'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 (SM) and also to probe in full the physics of the TeV scale. This was to become the CMS experiment at the LHC, one of the most complex instruments science has ever seen. Since 1991 Virdee has played a crucial role in all phases of CMS. 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 CMS, especially the selection of the calorimeter technologies. The CMS hadron calorimeter uses the technique he had invented earlier.
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Tejinder Virdee
Sir Tejinder Singh Virdee, FRS (Punjabi: ਤਜਿੰਦਰ ਸਿੰਘ ਵਿਰਦੀ, born 13 October 1952), is a Kenyan-born British experimental particle physicist and Professor of Physics at Imperial College London. He is best known for originating the concept of the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) alongside 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 and Honorary Fellow of the Institute of Physics (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 and CMS collaborations at CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC)", and the European Physical Society High Energy and Particle Physics Prize.
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 Panofsky Prize 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 in 2020.
Tejinder Virdee was born in 1952 to Sikh parents Udham Kaur and Chain Singh Virdee in Nyeri, Kenya. 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 origin) emigrated in 1967 to Birmingham, England. He credits part of his interest in physics to Howard Stockley, his physics teacher at King's Norton Boys' School, 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 in 1974.
After completing his Ph.D. at Imperial College London, on an experiment conducted at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) in California, he joined CERN 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 CERN in the mid-eighties. Following NA14 he joined the UA1 experiment at CERN'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 (SM) and also to probe in full the physics of the TeV scale. This was to become the CMS experiment at the LHC, one of the most complex instruments science has ever seen. Since 1991 Virdee has played a crucial role in all phases of CMS. 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 CMS, especially the selection of the calorimeter technologies. The CMS hadron calorimeter uses the technique he had invented earlier.