Queen Elizabeth II bestows Knighthood on Professor Tejinder (Jim) Virdee FRS
14 June 2014 London, England
Tejinder (Jim) Virdee has been honoured with a knighthood “for services to science”. This was announced on the Queen’s 2014 Birthday Honours list on 14thJune.
Jim said, "It was a complete surprise to me when I heard the news. To be frank it took a while for it to really sink in” adding “I am humbled and delighted”.
The long citation reads, “Professor Virdee is one of the UK's most distinguished physicists and, as one of the creators of the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) Experiment, he has made outstanding contributions to science. The CMS experiment, at the Large Hadron Collider, CERN, Geneva, has delivered seminal results in particle physics, including, and along with the ATLAS experiment, the groundbreaking discovery of the Higgs Boson. Beyond his innovative work in particle physics, he is also a great campaigner for science, and promoter of science and education in Africa and India.”
Jim added that, “Many thousands of brilliant scientists and engineers have worked on both experiments to make these results, and the Higgs discovery, possible. In particular I have had the pleasure and the honour to work closely with the many colleagues who have created the technological wonder that we call “CMS”.”
Jim has played a key role in all phases of CMS; the conceptual design, construction, commissioning and exploitation of physics and continues to be actively involved in the experiment. Looking ahead he says “no doubt next year will be another one filled with suspense for CMS as we again start to search for new physics at the higher energies”. He is also looking to the longer-term future of CMS with the proposal for a high granularity silicon based endcap calorimeter.
He continued “The discovery of a Higgs boson is only the end of one chapter in experimental particle physics. We are about to embark on another new exciting one hopefully one that will reveal new unknown physics phenomena in the next more higher energy run of CMS.
Professor Tom Kibble, also from Imperial College London, has been knighted as well. Tom is one of six distinguished researchers whose pioneering theoretical work in 1964 revealed the mechanism of spontaneous symmetry breaking with the prediction of the Higgs boson, most likely to be the one we discovered in July 2012. Our warmest congratulations to Jim and Tom.
Jim at P5 CMS Control Room, Cessy France, at the startup of CMS in 2009