Dr. Alexandre Laurier

Alexandre Laurier earned his PhD in Particle Physics at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada. A native English and French speaker, he did much of his research at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, an international research organization based in Geneva, Switzerland. He will still be able to conduct a significant portion of his research at CERN during his postdoc in the High Energy Physics group at Technion.

Along with thousands of physicists from around the world, Dr. Laurier works on ATLAS, a detector of nuclear particle interaction that is part of the LHC. For his PhD, he focused on understanding and measuring properties of the Z boson (a sub-atomic particle) produced with high energy objects called jets. He was appointed contact person for the analysis and eventually became the main editor of its 400-page supporting document. Thus he was one of the few researchers who both contributed to the operation of the experiment and also produced actual physics interpretation from the data, allowing his peers to reach the goal set by the experiment’s designers.

Dr. Laurier’s postdoc research focuses on a series of planned detector upgrades that will allow ATLAS to maintain the performance of final state objects in a new high luminosity environment. He works on two updates: the New Small Wheel in the forward regions of the detector, and the simulation of the Small-strip Thin Gas Chamber muon (another sub-atomic particle) triggering system. These improvements should contribute to the high quality of ATLAS’s data. He hopes to find signatures of new physics, which would be observed as deviations from the predictions of the Standard Model of physics.

Dr. Laurier hopes to eventually work with Canada’s particle accelerator center, TRIUMF, and to weave a network of academic collaboration and goodwill between Canadian and Israeli research laboratories.