CERN's new Director General

6 January 1999

On 1 January 1999, Professor Luciano Maiani became the latest Director General of CERN, the European Laboratory for Particle Physics. Maiani is a distinguished theoretical physicist who gained his first qualifications in Rome, he subsequently worked at the Universities of Florence and Harvard. He was made professor of Theoretical Physics at the University of Rome "La Sapienza" in 1984 and since 1993 has been the President of the Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare (INFN). His most important work to date was on the prediction (with Sheldon Glashow and J. Iliopoulos in 1970) of charmed particles, which contain charmed quarks. The proposal, known as the Glashow-Ilipoulos-Maiani (GIM) mechanism, has been critical to the formulation of the unified theory of the Electroweak Interactions. Charmed particles were discovered a few years later (1974) with properties very close to those anticipated in the original paper by Maiani and his colleagues.

Credit: CERN Photo

Please contact person or institution named for information about permission for public or commercial use.