Tatsuya Nakada awarded Honorary Doctorate from University of Zurich

Twelve Honorary Doctors were nominated by the seven faculties of the University of Zurich during its 2015 Academic Day (Saturday April 25). Among them is Tatsuya Nakada, EPFL professor in experimental particle physics, recognized for his impact on the field of high-energy physics and in particular in the "quark flavour" sector.

Since 1985, Tatsuya Nakada has worked constructing an experimental facility for studying fundamental properties of particles containing a "b" quark (where "b" stands for "beauty" or "bottom"), the second heaviest quark in the Standard Model of particle physics. With such a facility, the difference between particles containing a b quark and those containing an anti-b quark could be studied in great detail. This difference arises from the lack of perfect symmetry between matter and anti-matter, called "CP violation", which is one of the fundamental ingredients for understanding why our universe is dominated by matter while virtually no anti-matter has been observed.

Pursuing the early idea of constructing an electron-positron storage ring facility at the Paul Scherrer Institute (Villigen, Switzerland), Tatsuya Nakada proposed important design criteria for the study of CP violation. Such facilities were constructed at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in the US and at the KEK High Energy Accelerator Research Organisation in Japan, with design parameters very similar to those proposed by Tatsuya Nakada. The results obtained by the experiments performed at these two facilities confirmed the Standard Model mechanism for generating CP violation and led to a Nobel prize in Physics for two Japanese theoreticians, Kobayashi and Maskawa, awarded in 2008.

In the meantime, Tatsuya Nakada turned his interest to perform CP violation studies at CERN using the Large Hadron Collider. The LHCb experiment was specifically designed for this purpose by a large international collaboration where EPFL holds a significant position, and was approved by CERN in 1998. Tatsuya Nakada played a leading role in forming the collaboration, designing the experiment and coordinating the detector construction as "spokesperson" (project leader) from 1995 to 2008.

The LHCb detector has been functioning as designed since it began collecting data in 2009. It has been producing impressive new results in CP violation and rare decays of particles containing b or c quarks, representing a very sensitive search for new phenomena beyond the Standard Model. Today, the LHCb collaboration consists of 1100 members from 68 institutes in 16 different countries, and has so far published over 250 research papers across a range of topics in particle physics. A major upgrade of the detector is expected to increase its data-gathering capabilities after 2019.