Jacques Lefrançois receives the 1998 Scientific Prize of the CEA
The 1998 scientific prize
was awarded to Jacques Lefrançois, a Canadian physicist and CNRS
research director, for his work in particle physics and basic interactions.
During his career, Jacques Lefrançois studied numerous scientific
fields and played a significant role in the development of extremely advanced
particle detectors. He has conducted numerous experiments in the field of
subatomic physics, at the Linear Accelerator Laboratory of the National
Institute of Nuclear and Particle Physics, in Orsay, of which he was director
between 1994 and 1998; he participated in the ALEPH (electron-positron collider)
collaborative experiment at CERN. These experiments confirmed the Standard
Model, according to which matter is made up of 12 elementary particles,
divided into three families (quarks and leptons) which interact according
to four interaction forces.
Jacques Lefrançois has held important technical and scientific posts,
in particular for the ALEPH experiment: from 1982 to 1989, he was coordinator,
for IN2P3, of the construction of the electromagnetic calorimeter for ALEPH,
in collaboration with the CEA/Saclay; from 1984 to 1989, he was chairman
of the Steering Committee, which brings together the heads of the 29 participating
teams and is in charge of scientific decision-making. He has sat in several
international committees at CERN, at DESY (a German electron synchrotron,
in Hamburg), and since 1995, he has been a member of the committee of scientific
directives at CERN, of which he was elected chairman.
