Olivier SchneiderAprès une thèse en physique des particules à l'Université de Lausanne, soutenue en 1989, Olivier Schneider rejoint le LBL, Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory (Californie), pour travailler sur l'expérience CDF au Tevatron de Fermilab (Illinois), d'abord au bénéfice d'une bourse de chercher débutant du Fonds National Suisse pour la Recherche Scientifique, puis comme post-doc au LBL. Il participe à la construction et à la mise en service du premier détecteur de vertex au silicium fontionnant avec succès auprès d'un collisionneur hadronique, détecteur qui a permis la découverte du sixième quark, appelé "top". Dès 1994, il revient en Europe et participe à l'expérience ALEPH au grand collisionneur électron-positon du CERN (Genève), comme boursier puis comme titulaire d'un poste de chercheur au CERN. Il se spécialise en physique des saveurs lourdes. En 1998, il est nommé professeur associé à l'Université de Lausanne, puis professeur extraordinaire à l'EPFL en 2003, et enfin professeur ordinaire à l'EPFL en 2010. Ayant participé depuis 1997 à la préparation de l'expérience LHCb au collisionneur LHC du CERN, entrée en fonction à fin 2009, il en analyse maintenant les données. Il contribue aussi depuis 2001 à l'exploitation des données enregistrées par l'expérience Belle au laboratoire KEK (Tsukuba, Japon). Ces deux expériences étudient principalement les désintégrations de hadrons contenant un quark b, ainsi que la violation de CP, c'est-à-dire le non-respect de la symétrie entre matière et antimatière.
Aurelio BayAurelio Bay graduated in physics at the University of Lausanne (UNIL) in 1980 and got his PhD degree from the same institution in 1986 for a work on the determination of the axial form factor of the ? meson.
He then went to Lawrence Berkeley Laboratories (LBL), USA as a post doc for two years, where he worked on the TPC/2? Electromagnetic Calorimeter and the SSC/LHC detector. He then came back to Europe and was named Maître Assistant at University of Geneva till 1994, where he started working at the L3 experiment of LEP at CERN.
He was appointed Assistant Professor at the University of Lausanne in 1994 and Full Professor in 1998, continuing working at LEP, LEP2 and LHCb at CERN , and starting a collaboration at BELLE experiment at KEK, Tsukuba (Japan).
At the University of Lausanne he was Director of the Institute of High Energy Physics, Deputy Director of the Physics Department and Deputy of the Dean of the Faculty of Sciences.
In 2003, following the merge of UNIL physics department into the EPFL School of Basic Sciences, he was appointed Full Professor at Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), and Director of the EPFL Laboratory of High Energy Physics.
Elyahou KaponEli Kapon received his Ph.D. in physics from Tel Aviv University, Israel in 1982. He then spent two years at the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, as a Chaim Weizmann Research Fellow, where he worked mainly on phase-locked arrays of semiconductor lasers. From 1984 till 1993 he was with Bellcore, New Jersey, first as member of technical staff, and from 1989 as District Manager. At Bellcore, he worked on integrated optics in III-V compounds and on low-dimensional semiconductor nanostructures, particularly quantum wires and quantum dots. He managed the Quantum Structures District and the Integrated Optoelectronics District at Bellcore from 1989 till 1992 and from 1992 till 1993, respectively. In 1993 he was appointed Professor of Physics of Nanostructures at the Physics Department of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL), where he heads the Laboratory of Physics of Nanostructures. In 1999-2000 he spent his sabbatical as Sackler Scholar at the Mortimer and Raymond Sackler Institute of Advanced Studies in Tel Aviv University, Israel. During that period he helped establishing the Tel Aviv University Center for Nanoscience and Nanotechnology and served as its first Director from 2000 to 2002. In 2001 he founded the start up BeamExpress and has been serving as its Chief Scientist. He is currently serving as Director of the Institute of Quantum Electronics and Photonics in the Faculty of Basic Sciences at EPFL. His research interests include self-organization of nanostructures, optical properties and electron transport in low-dimensional quantum structures, quantum wire and quantum dot lasers, photonic crystals and vertical cavity surface emitting lasers. He is author or co-author of >300 journal articles, >10 patents, and editor of two books on semiconductor lasers.
Prof. Kapon is Fellow of the Optical Society of America, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, and the American Physical Society of America, and a recipient of a 2007 Humboldt Research Award.