| Citation | Professor of Physics, Department of Physics, Imperial College London
Tejinder Virdee is primarily distinguished for the design, construction and exploitation of the huge CMS experiment at the CERN Large Hadron Collider. He originated the concept of CMS with four colleagues around 1990 and there are now over 3000 participants from 38 countries. The motivation is the discovery of the mass generating mechanism for matter, currently considered to be the Higgs mechanism, and the nature of what lies beyond the Standard Model. Virdee devised a new technology for the large CMS electromagnetic calorimeter and one of his earlier innovations was employed for the hadron calorimeter. He was leader of the collaboration during final commissioning and first data taking between 2006 and 2010 and now concentrates on the search for the Higgs boson. The superb performance of CMS since high energy collisions began at the LHC is testimony to his foresight, expertise and appreciation of the complex interplay of techniques which are needed for such success.
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