User:Pnrj/Dante Amidei

Dante (also known as "Dan") Amidei is a particle physicist and professor at the University of Michigan who works at the Collider Detector at Fermilab. He is best known for his work on the discovery of the top quark and its properties. As of 2013, he had written over 500 papers which have been cited over 1200 times. He earned the Universities Research Association Visiting Scholar Award in 2008, and the American Physical Society Fellowship in 2007.

Early Career
Amidei attended Maine South High School, then earned his BS at MIT in 1978, and his PhD at Berkeley in 1984. He joined the faculty at the University of Michigan in 1990.

Silicon Vertex Detector and Top Quark Discovery
Amidei was closely involved in the development of methods to detect the top quark; he coordinated the design of a silicon vertex detector that could distinguish particle tracks less than 10 micrometers apart. This detector performed the bottom quark tagging used in distinguishing the top quarks from other possible particles, and it was cited as the reason for his APS Fellowship.

Regarding the development of the silicon vertex detector, Amidei said that "it was the union of the custom chip development at Berkeley and the detector development at Pisa that made the thing possible." (quoted in, p.92) Amidei said that it was not easy to convince everyone at CDF to install the detector in the first place: "There was a small number of folks who felt that there was no measurement advantage to be gained by doing precision tracking of the kind that the vertex detector would allow… people did not see at first the utility of being able to measure or tag particle lifetimes." (quoted in, p.96)

Amidei has continued studying the properties of the top quark for over a decade, and discovered a surprising asymmetry in top quark production in matter-antimatter collisions, on which he spoke at the 5th International Workshop on Top Quark Physics in 2012.

Other Work
Amidei was part of the ATLAS collaboration that searched for the Higgs boson at the Large Hadron Collider, a collaboration which ultimately was successful in finding the Higgs in 2013.

Amidei is heavily involved in physics education, including Saturday Morning Physics, at the University of Michigan; he has given several public lectures on introductory physics, some of which are available as slides and videos online.