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Name of creator

Maurice Jacob

Biographical history

Maurice Jacob studied physics at the Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris from 1953 to 1957, and obtained a PhD from the University of Paris in 1961 (Théorie formelle des collisions et états propres d'hélicité (Jacob 1961)).

In 1967 he joined CERN. He became one of the most respected international experts on the phenomenology of strong interactions, including diffraction, scaling, high-transverse-momentum processes and the formation of quark-gluon plasma. In particular he pioneered studies of inclusive hadron-production processes, including scaling and its violations.

With Ron Horgan, he made detailed predictions for the production of jets at the CERN proton-antiproton collider, which were subsequently discovered by the UA2 and UA1 experiments.  He organized the Les Houches workshop in 1978 that brought the LEP project to the attention of the wider European community of particle physicists, and organized the ECFA workshop in Lausanne that made the first exploration of the possible physics of the LHC.

Between 1982 and 1988, Jacob was leader of the CERN Theoretical Physics Division.

In parallel with his activities and responsibilities at CERN, Jacob played prominent roles in the French Physical Society, of which he was president in 1985, the European Physical Society, of which he was president from 1991 to 1993, and in scientific publishing. He was an enthusiastic supporter of European physics journals, and was editor of Physics Letters B, and founding editor of Physics Reports.

During the 1990s, he was responsible for CERN’s relations with its Member States.

He left CERN in 1998 and died in 2007.

Immediate source of acquisition or transfer

CERN Theory Department Secretariat, 20 April 2016