Members
Louvain-La-Neuve
Professors
Chiara Arina
My research activities relate to the dark matter problem within a particle physics perspective. My theoretical work focuses on dark matter model building in connection with the problem of generation of neutrino masses and/or of the visible matter. My phenomenological research focuses on various aspects of dark matter detection (direct, indirect and at collider), with a particular attention to the statistical approach.
Giacomo Bruno
Experimental physicist doing research with the CMS experiment at the LHC collider of the CERN laboratory and the Virgo laser interferometric antenna for gravitational wave detection at the EGO observatory.
On CMS: currently involved in searches for signals of physics beyond the Standard Model; development of calibration and reconstruction techniques; operation of the Belgian Tier2 computing centre that is part of the World LHC Computing Grid.
On Virgo: currently building up a research group at UCLouvain. Activities in physics data analysis (stochastic gravitational wave background), computing (redesign of Virgo computing model).
Eduardo Cortina Gil
Experimental particle physics. I'm mainly involved inNA62 experiment at CERN: detector completion and radiative kaon decays. I'm also interested in detector development for future experiments: monolithic pixel detectors and fine granularity calorimetry.
Céline Degrande
I am working on Effective Field Theory (EFT) at colliders mainly in top and electroweak sector. Recently, I have been focusing on the interplay between PDF and EFT fits and on the computation of NLO QCD corrections for the SMEFT.
I am the author of NLOCT and one of the FeynRules authors.
I am also investigating how the photon polarisation in cosmic rays can be used to probe BSM physics.
Christophe Delaere
Experimental particle physicist working on the performances and operation of the CMS detector, as deputy run coordinator. Also involved in the measurement of the Zb(b) cross-section and kinematical properties at LHC. The goal is to measure the process with early data to pave to road to searches for new physics with similar signatures.
Marco Drewes
I combine studies of the early universe with the results of laboratory experiments and astronomical observations to address fundamental questions in particle physics and cosmology.
Andrea Giammanco
Experimental particle physicist. Interested in data analysis, simulations, phenomenology, non-HEP applications of HEP techniques (and vice versa). Member of the CMS collaboration and of the DELPHES project. Active in "muography" (i.e. imaging with cosmic muons)
Jan Govaerts
Jean-Marc Gérard
Vincent Lemaitre
Experimentalist, CMS collaboration. Search for phenomena Beyond the Standard Model. In particular, in the scalar sector related to the electroweak symmetry breaking and in final states including top quarks. Also interested in the silicon tracker developments and construction for the next generation of experiments.
Fabio Maltoni
I am interested in the phenomenology of the standard model and beyond, and particularly in collider physics.
Krzysztof Piotrzkowski
Experimentalist. Working on VIRGO - the antenna of gravitational waves (GW). Testing theories of gravity and studying sources of GW. Working on R&D for the 3rd generation GW antenna - the Einstein Telescope. Studying also high energy photon interactions at colliders as well as novel timing detectors with picosecond resolution. Outreach.
Research scientists
Pavel Demin
I'm working for the CMS experiment. My current responsibilities: developing physics analysis software for CMS; heavy flavor jet tagging based on electron identification; enabling computing GRID at UCLouvain/CP3.
Olivier Mattelaer
Responsible software maintenance and development of MadGraph5_aMC@NLO (including most of the associated package and plugin)
Andres Tanasijczuk
Jérôme de Favereau
CP3 website developement and maintenance, issue tracking system, general support, cluster maintenance, openstack deployement, CMS detector upgrade among other things...
Postdocs
Wenyuan Ai
My research focuses on phase transitions as well as its applications in the early universe and electroweak vacuum metastability. I am also interested in nonequilibrium quantum field theory and black hole physics.
Office: E.253
Email: wenyuan.ai@uclouvain.be
Matteo Becchetti
I work in the area of theoretical particle physics, with a particular focus on the computation of higher-order corrections in SM and on the study of the Large-N limit of QCD.
Office: E.146
Ankit Beniwal
My research focuses on the phenomenology of simple dark matter models and their implications on direct, indirect and collider search experiments. I’m also interesting in mechanisms that generate the observed baryon asymmetry in our Universe.
Agni Bethani
My research interests revolve around Higgs physics and searches for physics beyond the Standard Model (SM). I am an expert in searches for Higgs pair production at the LHC. I was a member of CMS during my PhD, and after 5 years in ATLAS I returned to CMS in July 2019. While in ATLAS I lead the HH->bbττ analysis. Currently, in CMS, I am working on the HH->bbWW channel. As we gather more data at the LHC and improve our analysis techniques, the sensitivity to the Higgs pair production increases. The HH decays studies can constrain several SM parameters, with the Higgs self-coupling being the most important one. Therefore I am interested in the Effective Field Theory interpretation of the HH results. In parallel, I am contributing the flavour-tagging group in CMS. I am also interested in science communication, outreach and the representation of women and minorities in science.
Office: E.260
Email: agni.bethani@uclouvain.be
Claudio Caputo
I am an experimental particle physicist, member of the CMS collaboration. I am particularly interested in precision measurements of the Higgs boson and searches for new physics.
Office: E.164
Email: claudio.caputo@uclouvain.be
Marina Cermeno
My research has focused on DM phenomenology in astrophysical scenarios, more in particular about the interaction of Dark Matter inside dense objects, such as Neutron Stars and White Dwarfs, and possible measurable consequences from indirect new signals arising from them. Now, I'm also studying how circular polarisation of photons can arise from the interaction of DM with cosmic rays and how this can be used to probe BSM physics.
Office: E.162
Email: marina.cermeno@uclouvain.be
Andrew Cheek
My research has focused predominantly on the phenomenology of particle dark matter (DM). Incorporating multiple experimental techniques and looking for novel measurements that could help differentiate between particle models. I have developed RAPIDD, a software to quickly and accurately approximates direct detection of dark matter. I am interested in combining solutions to the dark matter problem with other outstanding problems with the Standard Model.
Pieter David
Experimental particle physicist, member of the CMS collaboration. Constraining new physics (in an EFT framework) in the production of top quarks together with bosons, and contributing to strip tracker calibration and software development.
Office: E.358
Email: pieter.david@uclouvain.be
Drazen Glavan
My research interests lie in the overlap of non-equilibrium quantum field theory and cosmology. In particular, my research focuses on quantum loop effects in primordial inflation, perturbative quantum gravity, and warm inflation, both from the formal and phenomenological approach.
Jan Hajer
BSM Phenomenology. Higgs physics, naturalness of the SM, SUSY.
Hidden particles at NA62.
Jan Heisig
I am conducting research in the fields of theoretical particle physics and cosmology investigating beyond standard models and their phenomenology at colliders, astrophysical and cosmological observations. I am developer of the numerical tools MadDM and SModelS.
Nicolas Lurkin
I am responsible for the development of the analysis framework and the Run Control of the NA62 experiment. My current research project is the search for new physics in the decay of the charged kaon into a pion and a pair of positrons, and the use of machine learning techniques to be applied for the principal research goal of the NA62 experiment, the measurement of the branching ratio of the K+-> pi+nunu decay.
My main areas of expertise are precision Standard Model measurements, searches for new physics in Kaon decays and development of slow control systems. I was previously involved in the NA62-RK experiment at CERN.
Ken Mimasu
Collider phenomenology beyond the Standard Model, particularly on extended scalar sectors (two-Higgs doublet models, axion-like particles). Probing the Electroweak phase transition at the LHC.
Confronting Baryogenesis via a strong electroweak phase transition with collider signatures at the LHC and beyond.
Precision Higgs measurements and global fits in the framework of effective field theory.
Kuntal Mondal
I have done my Ph.D. in measurement of properties of Higgs boson decaying to two photons using data recorded by CMS in the year 2016. I have also worked for CMS EGamma group and CMS Tracking POG and DQM group. Apart from that I have done CMS Tracker DQM Offline Shiftleadership and central online DQM shifts.
Jessica Prisciandaro
Experimentalist working on the CMS experiment at CERN. Current activities are a) search for long-lived Heavy Neutral Leptons, b) search for long-lived massive charged particles (HSCP), and c) silicon tracker calibration and operation
Office: E.260
Richard Ruiz
I am a high energy physicist and collider theorist. My primary research focuses on understanding the origin of tiny, nonzero neutrino masses and tests of neutrino mass models (Seesaw models) at collider experiments, such as the Large Hadron Collider. This includes extended gauge sectors (LR-Symmetric, GUT models), scalar sectors (SU(2)L doublets and triplets), and fermionic sectors (SU(2)L singlets and triplets). I have a particular interest in collider signatures involving initial-state electroweak vector bosons (vector boson fusion/scattering) and the impact of (resummed) QCD corrections on (new physics) collider processes. This includes resummation in the context of perturbative QCD and SCET.
Office: E.150
Email: richard.ruiz@uclouvain.be
Artur Shaikhiev
Search for rare decays/new particles. Interested in Monte Carlo simulation of physics experiments
Office: E.257
Email: artur.shaikhiev@uclouvain.be
Maksym Teklishyn
I focus on the semiconductor detectors for particle physics. Currently involved in the Phase 2 upgrade of the CMS Tracker, preparing the QA and assembling center at UCLouvain. Participate in the development of the simulation software for the silicon detectors.
Pietro Vischia
My main research interest is in statistics and machine learning; I am currently working on developing algorithms which employ resampling techniques to the problem of anomaly detection, and on the problem of expressing the expected statistical significance in an approximate way in searches for new signals.
I am a member of the CMS Collaboration, where I work as a statistics advisor (CMS Statistics Committee) and to experimental measurements in top-Higgs physics (ttH observation and top-Higgs coupling constraints in an EFT framework) and in Standard Model precision measurements (WZ, also constraining the triboson coupling in an EFT framework).
Roberta Volpe
Experimental particle physicist in NA62 experiment. Currently working on hidden sector searches with single track Kaon decays. My main focuses are: providing statistical treatment for the main analyses and implementing an interface between external generators (in particular MadDump/MadGraph) and the GEANT4 full simulation of the detector. I also work for the RICH (Ring Imaging CHerenkov) detector: I am responsible for the data quality and time calibration, and I am interested in improving the particle identification.
Office: E.255
Email: roberta.volpe@uclouvain.be
PhD students
Samip Basnet
Imaging of large structures with cosmic-ray muons.
Office: E.359
Email: samip.basnet@uclouvain.be
Florian Bury
Experimental particle physicist with the CMS experiment. I am interested in machine learning with an emphasis on neural networks, the matrix element method and how to combine them in an efficient way to make it suitable for LHC analyses. I am also working on di-Higgs production in the llbb channel and involved in the tracker upgrade simulation for CMS-Phase II.
Martin Delcourt
Development of a new tracker for the CMS upgrade phase 2 and study of the feasibility of measurements at the HL-LHC.
Antoine Depasse
Searches for gravitational waves signal emitted by ultralight boson clouds around rotating black holes with the LIGO-Virgo laser interferometers.
Suat Donertas
Hesham El Faham
My research focus is on probing the top-Higgs interaction with the CMS detector by performing the first differential and fiducial cross-section measurement of the ttH process in the dilepton final state. The vision is to have a complete EFT interpretation of the measurement in the SMEFT framework. I also work on the phenomenology of associated production of a top pair and a Higgs boson at the LHC to determine the trilinear-Higgs and the Yukawa couplings in an EFT framework.
Office: E.359
Email: hesham.elfaham@uclouvain.be
Khawla Jaffel
Alina Kleimenova
PhD student in experimental physics. I'm working on searches for long-lived exotic particles at the NA62 experiment at CERN.
Office: E.257
Philipp Klose
PhD Student with Marco Drewes and Chiara Arina.
Office: E.254
Email: philipp.klose@uclouvain.be
Luca Mantani
I work on LHC phenomenology, in particular how to detect new interactions among SM and interpret them via the SMEFT.
Office: E.256
Email: luca.mantani@uclouvain.be
Julien Touchèque
Phenomenology of weak bosons and top quark interactions with Effective Field Theory, focusing on CP violation.
Office: E.165
Tu Thong Tran
I study Electroweak couplings of the top quark in the production of top - anti top pair in association with a vector boson (W, Z)
Email: tu.thong.tran@cern.ch
Visitors
Daddy Balondo Iyela
Integrable quantum dynamics, Klauder-Daubechies deformations and noncommutative geometric structures
Phone: (+32 10 4) 7 8185
André Füzfa
Professor at FUNDP, working in theoretical cosmology: interpretations of dark energy, observational constraints from structure formation, Hubble diagram, CMB, ... and on complex systems in general relativity: dynamical systems, multi-physics N-body simulations, numerical relativity.
Phone: (+32 10 4) 7 3217
Master students
Gaël Van Dieren
Exploring the Cartan formulation of de Sitter geometry: from topological gauge field theory to gravity
Technical staff
Antoine Deblaere
Jean-Marc Delforge
Michael Jonckman
Jean-Pierre Page
Nicolas Szilasi
Administrative staff
Stéphanie Landrain
Carinne Mertens
Christine Thielens
Cellule Logistique et Comptable (CLC)
Guests
Thierry Delbar
Production and collection of Li8 and B8 nuclei to be used for the production of neutrino beams (project EuroNu)
Phone: (+32 10 4) 7 3202
Email: thierry.delbar@uclouvain.be
Ghislain Grégoire
Experimentalist. Detection of radiations (nearly all types ...). Design, simulation, construction, setup and operation of radiation detectors.
René Prieels
Energy issues: analysis of the energy future based mainly on the physical capabilities of all resources available.
Email: rene.prieels@uclouvain.be