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 Gianotti, who won world attention in 2012 for her leadership role
in CERN's discovery of the long-sought "Higgs boson", will take up
the post in January 2016 as scientists there look to new findings on
the origin and make-up of the universe.
Her appointment was decided at a meeting of the center's ruling
council, made up of representatives of its 20 member states, a CERN
announcement said. It remains to be formalized at a further meeting
in December.
Gianotti, 52 and a researcher at CERN near Geneva since she joined
it with a doctorate from the University of Milan in 1987, will
replace Rolf Heuer, who steered the centre through the
initially-troubled launch of the Large Hadron Collider.
The machine was primarily built to find the Higgs -- a theoretical
particle and related energy field which was thought to have made
formation of the physical universe possible by converting matter
into mass.
In the LHC, now awaiting relaunch with twice the power in spring
next year, elementary particles are smashed together at close to the
speed of light, creating billions of tiny "Big Bangs" and their
aftermath.
Gianotti in 2009 became project leader of the Atlas collaboration,
one of the two major teams working separately to spot the Higgs in
the LHC data.
With her counterpart from the CMS team, she detailed the finding of
the Higgs -- named for the British physicist who predicted its
existence in 1964 -- before a global television audience in July
2012.
The discovery brought a Nobel Prize in 2013 for Peter Higgs, the
British theorist, and Francois Englert, a Belgian physicist working
on the same idea with two other colleagues in the early 1960s and
who also posited the existence of the boson.
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Gianotti, an accomplished pianist who once considered devoting her
life to music, said she was honored to be named to head the
sprawling institute -- which links some 10,000 scientists on site
and around the globe -- along the Franco-Swiss border outside
Geneva.
"CERN is a centre of scientific excellence and a source of pride and
inspiration for physicists from all over the world, a cradle for
technology and innovation, and a shining concrete example of
scientific cooperation and peace," she said.
When collisions in the LHC are resumed, scientists will be looking
for evidence helping to resolve other major questions including the
dark matter thought to make up about a quarter of the universe and
dark energy accounting for some 70 percent.
(Reported by Robert Evans; Editing by Sonya Hepinstall)
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Italian
to become first woman head of CERN physics centre
