Michel Davier


Michel Davier is a French physicist.
Graduate of the École normale supérieure de Saint-Cloud, he was Director of the Laboratory of Linear Accelerator in Orsay from 1985 to 1994. Winner of the Gentner-Kastler Prize in 1994, he was elected a member of the French Academy of Sciences in 1996. He was appointed senior member of the Institut universitaire de France in 1991 for a five-year term, renewed in 1996.
He has been teaching physics since 1975 at the Paris-Sud University at the Centre scientifique d'Orsay.

Biography

Originally from Ambérieu-en-Bugey, Michel Davier studied at the Lycée Lalande in Bourg-en-Bresse, at the École Normale d'instituteurs in the same city, and then at the École Normale d'instituteurs in Lyon. After a year of preparatory classes at the Lycée Chaptal in Paris in 1960-61, he entered the École normale supérieure de Saint-Cloud where he obtained a degree in physics and chemistry. Admitted to the first agrégation in physics in 1965, he chose to focus on higher education and research in elementary particle physics. Having joined the Laboratory of Linear Accelerator founded in Orsay by the École Normale Supérieure as an assistant at the University of Paris-Sud, he did his doctoral work on the photoproduction of vector mesons at Stanford University in California at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, which he defended in 1969 in Orsay. After a two-year stay at the European Centre for Nuclear Research in Geneva, he joined Stanford University and SLAC as an assistant professor, then associate professor in 1973 where he conducted hadronic diffusion experiments. He returned to France in 1975 to take up the professorship left vacant by the untimely death of André Lagarrigue. He launched a research program on electron-positron annihilation at the highest energies available at the PETRA collider installed at the DESY laboratory in Hamburg. He is one of the founders of the ALEPH experiment that continues this research at CERN on the LEP collider from 1989, providing precision measurements that will establish the Standard Model of Fundamental Interactions.  In 2001, he joined the international collaboration that operates the BABAR detector at SLAC to launch an original precision measurement program. In parallel with his activities in particle physics, he strongly supports the Franco-Italian Virgo project for the research of gravitational waves and welcomed Alain Brillet's team to the LAL in 1991. He actively participates in the construction of the interferometer and data analysis by creating his own group.
He directed the Linear Accelerator Laboratory from 1985 to 1993. Senior member of the Institut Universitaire de France since 1991, corresponding member of the French Academy of Sciences in 1994, he was elected member in 1996. He has been a member of numerous international scientific councils: SLAC, LAL, CERN, DESY, LNF, IHEP, KEK, APPEC, LIGO, Scientific Guidelines Committee, National Committee and CNRS Scientific Council, Helmholtz Gemeinschaft.
The dual aspect of university education, at the University of Paris-Sud, the École Normale Supérieure and the École Polytechnique, and the training of young researchers represents an important investment in Michel Davier's career. He has actively supervised many doctoral theses. In this field, he has maintained a privileged relationship with China since 1988 through close collaboration with the Institute of High Energy Physics, for the training of Chinese doctoral students and postdoctoral fellows in Orsay, many of whom are now professors and scientific leaders in China.

Scientific works

Michel Davier's research has led to significant advances in the physics of strong and electroweak interactions through the construction and operation of large detectors, CELLO in Hamburg, ALEPH at CERN and BABAR at SLAC:
The construction, development and analysis of the Virgo interferometer data involved a colossal effort through international collaboration in which the group founded by Michel Davier at the LAL took a significant part: