Michel Della Negra (born 1942) is a French experimental particle physicist known for his role in the 2012 discovery of theHiggs Boson.

Della Negra studied mathematics and theoretical physics for his doctorate at the Laboratory of Nuclear Physics of theCollege de France inParis, defending his thesis on the experimental study of proton-antiproton annihilation in 1967. In the 1970s, following post-doctoral work at theStanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) inPalo Alto, California, he involved himself on high-energy physics projects atCERN inGeneva, Switzerland, where he worked initially as a member of theIntersecting Storage Rings group. In 1977 joined the team led byCarlo Rubbia and played an important role in the 1981 discovery of theW andZ bosons. Della Negra and his colleague fromImperial College London,Tejinder Singh Virdee, were among the first to envisage ahermetic detector for theLarge Hadron Collider (LHC) based on a strong magnetic field, thecompact muon solenoid (CMS), and was spokesman for the CMS from 1992 until 2006. Together with evidence from the A Toroidal LHC Apparatus (ATLAS), the CMS experiments were crucial to the discovery of theHiggs Boson in 2012. As of 2018 he is physicist emeritus of the physics department of CERN, and CMS emeritus atImperial College London.^[1]

Della Negra shared the 2013 SpecialBreakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics for the discovery of theHiggs Boson with his pioneering colleaguesFabiola Gianotti andPeter Jenni from ATLAS,Tejinder Singh Virdee,Guido Tonelli, andJoe Incandela from CMS, and LHC project leaderLyn Evans.^[2] He also shared the 2012Julius Wess Prize from theKarlsruher Institut für Technologie with Jenni,^[3] and the 2013High Energy and Particle Physics Prize of theEuropean Physical Society withP. Jenni,T. Virdee, and theCMS andAtlas collaborations.^[4] In 2014 he won thePrix André Lagarrigue of theUniversity of Paris-Sud for his "exceptional quality in building experimental devices of great complexity, with a profound understanding of physics".^[5] In 2017 he shared thePanofsky Prize in experimental particle physics with Jenni and Virdee.^[1]

• 20th-century French physicists
• 21st-century French physicists
• Collège de France alumni
• 1942 births
• Living people
• Winners of the Panofsky Prize
• People associated with CERN

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