Rolf-Dieter Heuer
Director-General of CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, Geneva, Switzerland
Breaking the Wall of the Hidden Universe. How Particle Physics Can Explain the Nature of Matter.
Particle physics doesn’t just expand our horizons – it helps to explain the universe by examining the nature of matter, both seen and unseen. Rolf-Dieter Heuer (1948) works with the Large Hadron Colider (LHC) at CERN, which is poised to provide experimental evidence either confirming or refuting the existence of the Higgs boson, an elementary particle predicted to exist by the Standard Model of particle physics. The Higgs boson is a turning point - its discovery would complete the Standard Model, one of the crowning achievements of 20th century science. But the Standard Model deals only with the ordinary matter that makes up the visible universe. The LHC is also poised to break the wall of the hidden universe - the 96% of it that takes the form of dark matter and energy.
In Heuer’s career as a physicist, he has worked on the construction and operation of several large particle detector systems, among them JADE at the German Electron Synchrotron in Hamburg, Germany. In early 2009, he took up the position of Director-General of CERN.
