Nicolas Arnaud

After earning a PhD in the Virgo experiment (direct detection of gravitational waves) and spending a year as a CERN fellow with the LHCb collaboration, Nicolas joined the Centre National de la Recherche Scientific (IN2P3/CNRS) in Orsay as a staff physicist. He then began working on the BaBar experiment and for this spent four years at SLAC in California. Upon returning to France in 2009, he got involved in SuperB, the Italian-based project of a new generation super flavour factory, until that endeavor got terminated due to lack of funding. Then Nicolas has joined the Virgo collaboration again where he has enjoyed contributing to the discoveries of gravitational waves since 2015. He is currently chairing the detector characterization and data quality group.

Nicolas has always been interested in outreach activities: lab visits for students, teachers and the general audience, exhibits, and more. The two main projects he has been a part of are ‘Élémentaire‘ or ‘Elementary’, an outreach magazine about particle physics and the book ‘Passeport pour les deux infinis‘ (‘Passport for the two infinities’) which provides a general audience with up-to-date information about two major research fields: the infinitely small (nuclear and particle physics) and the infinitely large (astronomy, some astrophysics and cosmology). Since 2012, Nicolas has been co-coordinating the yearly French Teacher Programmes at CERN. Nicolas is also involved in the Masterclasses “hands on particle physics”: he is member of their steering committee and is coordinating French sessions since 2010.

“Outreach is not just an ‘extra’ to scientific and technical activities; it is truly an essential part of them.”